Fritz Lang's "Clash by Night" Blu-ray - Barbara Stanwyck / Robert Ryan
Added 2023-07-02 15:57:23 +0000 UTCBONUS CAPTURES:
Fritz Lang's "Clash by Night" Blu-ray - Barbara Stanwyck / Robert Ryan
OUR REVIEW:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film11/blu-ray_review_174/clash_by_night_blu-ray.htm
Mae Doyle is a good-time girl, but now times are bad. Weary of too much booze and too many men, she returns to her girlhood home, the fishing village of Monterey, California. There she finds security as the wife of a devoted and dull fisherman - and passion in the arms of his provocative best friend. Film noir master Fritz Lang (The Big Heat, Ministry of Fear) directs four towering talents - Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and rising star Marilyn Monroe - in a stark tale of lives burnished by human emotion and shattered by human failings. Intense and powerfully realistic, Clash by Night (from a Clifford Odets play) is about many towns, many families. Serene on the surface. Roiling with desperation underneath.
***
Fritz Lang's Clash by Night was based on Clifford Odets' 1941 play and the titles was taken from a line in Matthew Arnold's 1851 poem "Dover Beach" with the film showing a lot of the fishing industry in Monterey, California. Clash by Night is notable as the first major film to credit Marilyn Monroe before the title (fourth billing.) It is two stories - separated by a year and while having enough Noir conventions to qualify as a cycle inclusion it's an anti-romance with dramatic, flawed, and often, cynical characters. It has a great cast with Barbara Stanwyck (who replaced Joan Crawford) as unsatisfy-able Mae, Robert Ryan brutally effective as the misogynist Earl, innocent cannery gal Marilyn and devoted Paul Douglas in one of his best roles. The actor squeezed a lot into his 52-years being married 5 times including to actresses Virginia Field (The Earth Dies Screaming) and Jan Sterling (Ace in the Hole.) I was pleased to see this via Warner Archive's improved Blu-ray a/v. Recommended for Noirish Lang, Stanwyck, Ryan and glimpses of early Monroe (during production scandalous nude calendar photos of Marilyn surfaced.)
