CLASH BY NIGHT

After ten years of disappointment, Barbara Stanwyck's Mae Doyle returns to her California fishing hometown looking for something resembling a decent life. In Fritz Lang's CLASH BY NIGHT, she marries a good-hearted fisherman (Paul Douglas) who offers her the security she's never had, only to find herself dangerously attracted to his best friend (Robert Ryan), a married movie projectionist who appears to hate his wife, his job, and just about everyone he's ever met. Stanwyck knows perfectly well what kind of man he is, which only seems to make matters worse. Marilyn Monroe nearly steals the picture as a tough, outspoken cannery worker with a much less accommodating attitude toward the men in her life.

Adapted from a play by left-wing dramatist Clifford Odets, CLASH BY NIGHT is a bitter, bruising examination of marriage, sexual desire, and the limited choices available to women in working-class America. Lang opens with extraordinary documentary footage of Monterey's fishing industry, establishing a world of hard physical labor before turning his attention to the equally exhausting business of living with other people. What follows is a remarkably unsentimental melodrama in which everyone wants something they can't quite name, nobody seems capable of leaving well enough alone, and even the most ordinary conversations threaten to become acts of mutual destruction. Stanwyck and Ryan are magnificent together, their attraction fueled as much by contempt as desire. Few films are quite so attentive to the ways people turn their most intimate relationships into instruments of self-punishment, or so understanding of why they keep doing it.