Fritz Lang’s wavering American career hit a high note in this adaptation of a Clifford Odets play with a four-star cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and Marilyn Monroe, all billed above the title. It’s a tawdry love triangle in a fishing town, where infidelity brings violence to the surface. Monroe’s character — “Twenty, the age of miracles” — has her own view of matrimonial harmony. Lang holds up his end, but the actors’ handling of the stylized Odets dialogue is what makes the movie work.

Clash by Night
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1952 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 105 min. / Available at MovieZyng / Street Date May 2, 2023 / 21.99
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe, J. Carrol Naish, Keith Andes, Silvio Minciotti.
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Production Designer:
Art Directors: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D’Agostino
Film Editor: George Amy
Original Music: Roy Webb
Written by Alfred Hayes from a play by Clifford Odets
Produced by Harriet Parsons, Norman Krasna, Jerry Wald
Directed by Fritz Lang

This moody drama is usually labeled Noir. We’d call it ‘noir by association’ — it’s really a deep-dish theater piece, a dramatic potboiler from Clifford Odets. The Depression-Era actor and playwright was a founding member of the Group Theater. For Hollywood he wrote The General Died at Dawn and adapted Richard Llewellyn’s None but the Lonely Heart. Odets’ own plays became movies scripted by other writers: Golden Boy, The Country Girl, The Big Knife and Clash by Night. His most noted screenplay is an adaptation of Ernest Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success, one of the few films with dialogue more stylized than Odets’ own Deadline at Dawn, itself a rewrite of an original by Cornell Woolrich.

Adapted from Odets’ 1941 play, the low-key but above-average  Clash by Night has likely been given the bump to Blu-ray for the same reason as last month’s The Prince and the Showgirl:  it features an impressive performance by Marilyn Monroe. Although it lacks the usual violence and visual excesses of the noir style, the unsettled, dissatisfied attitude is there, built into Clifford Odets’ disenchanted characters. It’s a quality production, with excellent direction from Fritz Lang in the studio and on distant location on the Monterey Peninsula.

Home is where you come when you run out of places.

Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to the house of her brother Joe (Keith Andes) after being on her own in the city for ten years. Joe isn’t happy about her circumstances — she was romantically involved with a married politician, and had nowhere else to go after he died. Mae is courted by Jerry D’Amato (Paul Douglas), a sincere but unexciting fisherman. She initially resists marriage out of fear that she’ll not be faithful. But they do eventually marry and have a child. That’s when Mae finds herself drawn to Jerry’s best friend, the cynical, faux-intellectual Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan).

Fritz Lang tries to distinguish Clash by Night with an unusual opening before any of the characters are introduced. It was the third Norman Krasna / Jerry Wald production for RKO’s Howard Hughes, who approved the serious location shooting up in Monterey. Lang was allowed to let the  ‘wild’  California coast enhance the interpersonal drama. A poetic prologue sequence shows the entire fishing process, including the way the fish are sorted by machine back in the cannery. The prologue’s documentary aspect reminds of the opening logging sequence in Howard Hawks and William Wyler’s Come and Get It, from 1936.

“You don’t know anything about me. What kind of an animal am I? Do I have fangs? Do I purr? What jungle am I from? You don’t know a thing about me.”

The original Broadway play was set in a fishing community on Staten Island, with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead role. Alfred Hayes’ screen adaptation reportedly reversed Odets’ original grim finale. The play’s Jerry eventually commits a tragic murder that sounds similar to Lang’s own Scarlet Street. Contemporary critics liked the actors, even as they disliked the notion that roughhouse physicality is inseparable from love relationships. Earl Pfeiffer is a (hollow) physical threat and Jerry D’Amato doesn’t know how violent he can become; in the complimentary Joe Doyle-Peggy courtship, affection is expressed with love-punches. In a less morally sanitized context, these ‘hits that don’t hurt’ games might suggest the sordid & abusive relationship in Lang’s superb version of Lilliom.

The show’s keeps us interested in the love triangle with Clifford Odets’ stylized dialogue. Stanwyck, Douglas and Ryan deliver the sharp talk sound as naturally as possible, and we’re soon aware that trouble is brewing. Nice guy Jerry doesn’t realize that his patronizing pal Earl is friendly only because he’s lonely. Earl gripes about his failed marriage to a burlesque stripper that we never see because she’s ‘on tour.’ Mae sees through Earl’s smart-guy pretenses yet is well aware that she’s drawn to physically strong men who know what they want. There seems no solution for the romantic conflict, which also adds to the noir mood. Mae talks an independent line but also wants a man of her own. Jerry is not going to suddenly become 100% self-aware and take charge of the situation. And added pressure will only aggravate Earl’s selfish cruelty.

“Take any six women – my wife included. Throw ’em up in the air. The one who sticks to the ceiling, I like.”

The original play situated all three characters lower on the moral scale. The screenplay retains some sordid edges, but Mae’s low-rent situation in the fishing town looks very clean and above-board, with no signs of poverty or squalor around the edges. It’s not like Howard Hawks’ old pre-Code fisherman tale Tiger Shark, where everybody seems to be barely getting by, and an unattached working woman can be had by anyone who can put a roof over her head. Warners’ own packaging still claims that Mae was a ‘good-time girl’ back in the city. All we really know is that her affair with a married politician didn’t have a happy ending. In Production Code terms she’s a ‘woman of experience,’ tainted as potentially damaged goods, a poor risk for a ’respectable’ marriage.

We also may resist Clash by Night because Barbara Stanwyck does much better when playing strong and independent women, and Mae Doyle is essentially weak and indecisive. We take Mae as a strong woman who must have had some very bad luck. She doesn’t seem so stupid as to not have protected herself back in the Big City. Mae doesn’t really respect the good-hearted Jerry, and all but marries him by default, to force herself to accept a simpler lifestyle. She still seems more worthy than the virginal lummox Jerry and the romantic loser Earl. We wonder if Robert Ryan’s Earle is seen in his undershirt as a reaction to Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Talented as he is, Fritz Lang may not be the right director for an intimate overheated drama — he tends to put themes of guilt, fatality and destiny right on the surface. Mae talks tough but is a softie, Earl is a festering misogynist, and Jerry is the kind of guy who laughs at the same stale jokes again and again. The characters work best if one is attuned to the stylized dialogue:

“You know what I’d like?  I’d like to get  unborn …”

The story continuity is broken into two parts, before and after the birth of Mae and Jerry’s baby. With the dramatic structure locked in, Fritz Lang occupies himself with the solving of technical problems, like a beachside club shot that uses two coordinated rear-projections. Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe run across the screen as part of a projection plate on a beach, and then appear on the right half of the screen ‘live’ in front of a second rear-projection plate.  ^*   Overall, the movie lacks a strong sense of momentum. Additional running time is taken up with business between Jerry’s sweet father (Silvio Minciotti) and larcenous uncle (J. Carrol Naish).

“I hate people bossin’ me. You marry a fella and the first thing he does is boss you.”

The subplot with Joe Doyle and his girlfriend Peggy draws more attention than it should because Peggy is played by Marilyn Monroe, whose career was just shifting into high gear. The role is more than a bit part, and she acquits herself rather well. Mae gives Peggy some choice counsel: “Always take the man who’ll break the door down. Advice from Mama.”  Reports from the set were that Ms. Monroe accepted Fritz Lang’s demanding direction without too much difficulty. Lang allowed Monroe’s acting coach Emily Lytess on the set until he found out she was working with Marilyn at home. From then on he coached her himself with Stanwyck’s help. It worked out– Monroe got star billing and received generally good reviews.

(spoiler)

The worst sin Clash by Night can think of is infidelity; Mae hasn’t overcome her need to stray and draws the blame for once again causing a potential marital breakup. The faultless Jerry is never tasked to stretch or open up — he just is. Jerry can’t even become emotional on his own. His troublemaking uncle is the one to provoke him to attack Earl. Jerry is sincere, but he’s also a little on the infantile side, a credible character difficult to fully respect. Mae marries him out of a yearning to ‘be taken care of,’ something that in real life happens every day but that the Production Code was never capable of accepting as a social norm. We were raised to believe that anything less than a blessed romance was a failure.

“If I ever loved a man again, I’d bear anything. He could have my teeth for watch fobs.”

The solution is for Mae to crawl back for forgiveness. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s not particularly satisfactory.  Earl is sent packing, Mae learns her lesson at least for the present, and Jerry decides to be as he always was, trusting and basically clueless. It’s a slice of life tale, where the strongest element is holdover dialogue from Odets’ play.

There’s one more aspect of Clash by Night to appeal to movie fans, a depiction of a theatrical projection booth, something rarely seen in the movies. Earl Pfeiffer works as a projectionist. If the movie is accurate things certainly changed from 1952 to 1972, when Savant began frequenting projection booths in Westwood. Because nitrate prints were still in use, Union safety rules mandated full staffing, often with two projectionists on duty. Earl Pfeiffer’s booth is as clean as a surgery and he attends to his craft like a Zen master. He appears to be projecting from 1,000-foot reels, with a changeover every 9 or 10 minutes. Does this explain how most of the old studio prints we saw at UCLA were in such good condition?

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Clash by Night of course bests the very good older DVD from 2005 — the higher-grade format reminds us of how beautifully turned out were RKO’s films of the period. Although not given to exotic expressionist effects, Nicholas Musuraca’s B&W images are much richer than those of Lang’s later, plain-wrap RKO pictures for Bert Friedlob, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. That documentary-like opening is quite handsome.

Peter Bogdanovich knew Fritz Lang personally. His feature commentary is salted with audio bites from his own 1965 interview with the legendary director. They go over the same topics Lang discussed with Lotte Eisner for her feature biography Fritz Lang : working with Monroe, the rear-projection trick, the docu opening. But they’re all good stories.

An original trailer is also included.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Clash by Night
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Peter Bogdanovich
Original trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 29, 2023
(6930clas)

^*   The Lotte Eisner book Fritz Lang has the director’s sketch of the clever rear projection setup. Studios technicians indulged in complicated RP setups in the postwar years — Universal’s Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid and Criss Cross, RKO’s On Dangerous Ground. These process shots — studio work to get around location shooting where dialogue recording would be difficult — were accepted as a convention all the way through the 1960s.

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.
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