Clash by Night (Wald-Krasna Productions, RKO, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third film we watched in last night’s (Sunday, August 20) Barbara Stanwyck tribute on TCM was the one I was really looking forward to seeing: Clash by Night, a 1952 melodrama about a Monterey fishing community directed by Fritz Lang and written by Alfred Hayes based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets that was originally a Broadway production with Tallulah Bankhead in the role Barbara Stanwyck plays here. She’s Mae Doyle, a woman who left the fishing village of Monterey, California where she grew up 10 years before. She drifted into an affair with a big-city politician who strung her along with vague promises of marriage as soon as he could divorce his current wife. Then he died suddenly and the wife and her relatives descended on her and, in a series of lawsuits, took the bequest he’d willed her. Broke and at loose ends, she’s just returned to Monterey when the film opens. She moves in with her brother Joe (Keith Andes, who got an “introducing” credit and should have become a major star), who works on the local fishing boat owned by Jerry D’Amato and is dating Peggy (Marilyn Monroe, billed fourth but above the title for the first time). Jerry has his hands full not only with the fishing business, which is getting harder due to the thinning out of the fish schools, but with his alcoholic father (Silvio Minciotti) and uncle Vince (J. Carrol Naish). Nonetheless, he’s immediately attracted to Mae, and though she isn’t really in love with him she accepts his marriage proposal. They live together in Jerry’s home along with his dad and uncle, and eventually they have a child, Gloria (Deborah and Diane Stewart: identical twins, Hollywood’s usual work-around for the laws governing how many hours a child can work).

Only Mae is still restless and lonesome, so she's vulnerable to the advances of the cynical Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan), who runs the projectors at the local movie theatre and has a wife who’s a burlesque stripper, frequently out of town on tour. Eventually Mrs. Pfeiffer decides to divorce him and Earl reacts by grabbing Mae and virtually raping her – though she seems thrilled by his overall virility even while seemingly being turned off by his cynicism. When Jerry finds out the two have been having an affair, he kidnaps Gloria and hides her on his fishing boat. Earl threatens to run off with Mae but Jerry tells her that if she does that, she’ll never see their daughter again. Earl confronts Jerry on the boat and Jerry assaults him with murder in his eyes and heart, but then Mae shows up and tells them to knock it off. Eventually Earl goes off and Jerry and Mae attempt a rather guarded reconciliation. I’d seen this before with Charles in the early 1990’s on a VHS tape I’d recorded off TCM back when I still could (and I recorded TCM by the yard back then!) and was quite impressed. It’s still a good movie but not as much so as I thought back then, and its main problem is Clifford Odets. He really, really, really didn’t like women (though he certainly had a lot of affairs with them!), and there’s an annoying strain of sexism in the dialogue even though it’s nowhere nearly as awful as Odets’ The Country Girl in this regard. In fact, Clash by Night offers a few feminist moments not only from Stanwyck (which we expect) but from Monroe (which we don’t): at one point Keith Andes is loudly proclaiming his intent to dominate the woman he marries physically – and she responds by punching him in the arm. At this point I joked, “Ah, a road-not-taken for Marilyn!”

Director Fritz Lang had fond memories of this film in his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse. “Working with Barbara Stanwyck was one of the greatest pleasures of my career,” he said, “She’s fantastic, unbelievable, and I liked her tremendously. When Marilyn missed her lines – which she did constantly – Barbara never said a word. I remember a particularly difficult scene between the two of them in which Barbara was hanging out some laundry and Marilyn had to say one or two lines. Although Marilyn missed her cue three or four times, all Barbara said was, ‘Let’s try it again.’” Lang said that during the shooting reporters were pushing past Stanwyck and saying things like, “Who wants to talk to that old Stanwyck dame? Who’s that girl over there with the big tits?” And during the remaining 10 years of her life Monroe often said that, of the older generation of Hollywood stars, Stanwyck was the only one who had been nice to her and treated her respectfully. Clash by Night strikes me as a stronger-than-usual movie in one regard; though they’re hamstrung by having to speak Clifford Odets’ intellectually clunky dialogue, at least the leads are able to make their characters seem like real people with genuinely complex emotions instead of the usual cardboard characters of most movies. It’s a real pity that Lang couldn’t get his men to act with the same restraint as his women; Stanwyck gives a first-rate performance and so does Monroe in the small amount of screen time she has (her line blowing notwithstanding; though Monroe had made at least 12 movies before this one, this was only the second that actually required her to act; John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle was the first), but Paul Douglas starts at 11 and Robert Ryan starts at 10 ½. There are Fritz Lang movies in which he gets powerfully restrained performances from his men – including Peter Lorre in M, Spencer Tracy in Fury, Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once, Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and later Raymond Burr in The Blue Gardenia – but not this time.