Scarlet Street
Orson Welles had notorious problems with financing but his three film noirs were well budgeted: "The Lady from Shanghai" (1947) received top-level, "prestige" backing, while "The Stranger" (1946), his most conventional film, and "Touch of Evil" (1958), an unmistakably personal work, were funded at levels lower but still commensurate with headlining releases. Like "The Stranger", Fritz Lang's "The Woman in the Window" (1945) was a production of the independent International Pictures. Lang's follow-up, "Scarlet Street" (1945), was one of the few classic noirs to be officially censored: filled with erotic innuendo, it was temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta and New York State. "Scarlet Street" was a semi-independent, cosponsored by Universal and Lang's Diana Productions, of which the film's co-star, Joan Bennett, was the second biggest shareholder. Lang, Bennett and her husband, the Universal veteran and Diana production head Walter Wanger, made "Secret Beyond the Door" (1948) in similar fashion.