La donna della spiaggia

A Coast Guard officer gets involved with a strange woman and her blind husband.

Small wonder Renoir went back to France after this Hollywood misfire. I don't know what the backstory is but the movie's a mess, great director or no. The problem pretty much begins and ends with a screenplay that makes next to no sense. Start with motivation-- is Peggy (Bennett) a loving wife who simply strays, or maybe she's just a nympho addicted to sex, or even a masochist who likes pain; or maybe even a woman deeply in love with Tod (Bickford). Unfortunately, there're reasons for any and all of these, thanks to the meandering script.

Then again, considering how changeable human emotions can be, maybe the options are not as mutually exclusive as first appears; maybe Peggy is just really mixed up. Still, it would take a far better script to effectively work out that particular pathology whatever it is. Here, options are simply dumped together into an incoherent jumble. Unfortunately, Tod's character is similarly mangled-- try figuring out, for example, how Tod and Scott (Ryan) really feel about each other. But there's no need to repeat the points other critics have enumerated.

Then there's the staging. In particular, consider the following-- a half-blind(?) Tod tumbles from a 100-foot rocky cliff with only minor head scratches; in a rocking little boat, Tod and Scott stand stock still as the seas rage beside them; at the same time, the two enemies survive after hours of clinging to the roiling wreckage. To me, all of these staging fiascos could be made more credible with better planning.

Fortunately for the movie and us, there are arresting visuals to focus on— the opening nightmare is a stunner, along with the wrecked ship on the beach. Renoir also creates an intense fantasy-like atmosphere with the foggy beach and the ship's grotesque skeleton. Then too, Ryan and Bickford make convincing hard-nosed adversaries. But these upsides are unfortunately not enough to salvage the overall result.

Considering Renoir's previous successes, especially with the lyrically impressive The Southerner (1945), I'm guessing the studio had a dead hand in (mis)shaping the final cut. But, I guess it's also possible that the director-writer was trying to bring some European sophistication to a moody love story that just doesn't work. But whatever the ultimate reason, the movie remains a disappointing muddle.

Woman on the Beach, The (1947)

*** (out of 4)

This film features a very interesting story and there are a lot of great moments but at the same time there's a lot of silly and over the top moments and all of the blame has to go towards director Renoir. There's a very good love triangle going on here with a very well done mystery but for some reason Renoir lets the film slip into several over the top moments, which get a few laughs, which certainly wasn't the intent. One problem are the performances by Bennett and Ryan. Both fit their roles very nicely but each have scenes where their characters go so over the top that you've gotta wonder if Renoir was even watching what they were doing. There's also a scene near the end where it seems like Bennett was calling the shots on her own and doesn't know how to act in the scene, which turns out being rather confusing on her characters part. Bickford on the other hand delivers a very fierce and strong performance as the blind man with a temper. He clearly steals the show and acts circles around the other two leads. The film runs 71-minutes and goes by very fast and includes a couple very suspenseful scenes including one where the man wants to know if the husband is really blind and makes him walk on the edge of a cliff. Overall, the film kept me entertained but it's a shame this didn't turn out to be a masterpiece because all the pieces are there but just don't gel as well as they should.

By 1947, Jean Renoir, at least indirectly, wasn't new to the American film noir style. Two years earlier, Fritz Lang had released the first of his two Renoir remakes, 'Scarlet Street (1945),' which was based upon 'La Chienne / The Bitch (1931)' {the second film, 'Human Desire (1954),' was inspired by 'La Bête humaine (1938)'}. 'Scarlet Street' notably starred Joan Bennett in a prominent role, which makes it interesting that, despite allegedly disliking that film, Renoir himself used her in his own Hollywood film noir, 'The Woman on the Beach (1947).' It's a visually-magnificent film, with photography from Leo Tover and Harry Wild (the latter of whom shot 'Murder, My Sweet (1944)' and 'Macao (1952)') that perfectly captures the mystery and eerie calm of the beach-side setting, frequently swathed in gentle clouds of mist that foreshadow the ambiguity and uncertainty of the story that follows. When we first glimpse Joan Bennett on the fog-swathed coast, collecting driftwood at the wreck of a grounded ship, she really does look ghostly and ethereal, a premonition that may or may not be real.

Robert Ryan plays Scott, a coastguard who suffers from regular night terrors concerning memories of a war-time naval tragedy, when his ship was presumably torpedoed. His dream sequences are gripping and otherwordly, recalling the excellently surreal work achieved by Renoir in his silent short film, 'The Little Match Girl (1928).' During his nightmares, Scott imagines an underwater romantic liaison, which, before he can get intimate, unexpectedly blows up in his face; this is an apt indication of the events that unfold later in the film. Scott is engaged to marry the pretty Eve (Nan Leslie), but his attention is soon distracted by Peggy (Joan Bennett), the titular "woman on the beach." Peggy is married to Tod (Charles Bickford), a famous blind artist who is still coming to terms with his relatively recent affliction. At just 71 minutes in length, 'Woman on the Beach' feels far too short, the apparent victim of studio interference. Scott is obviously enamoured, and later obsessed, with femme fatale Peggy, in a manner than suggests Walter Neff's fixation with Phyllis Dietrichson, but the motivations behind his actions are inadequately explored and explained.

Perhaps as a result of the studio's trimming of scenes, many plot-twists in the film seem somewhat contrived. Scott's extreme determination in proving that Tod is faking blindness feels so incredibly illogical – why, indeed, would Tod even consider such a con? Many wonderful scenes are severely hampered by the story's lack of exposition. In the film's most dramatic scene, amid the choppy waters of the Atlantic, Robert Ryan displays a frighteningly convincing rage that borders on pure psychosis, a quality that Nicholas Ray exploited five years later in 'On Dangerous Ground (1952).' However, because Scott's obsession and emotional transformation had previously been explored so sparsely, the sequence feels, above all else, out of context. The performances are nevertheless solid across the board, with Bickford probably the most impressive. Bennett's character is tantalisingly ambiguous: throughout the film, she slowly reveals herself to be nothing but a greedy tramp, though Scott insists on treating her as a tormented victim of abuse. The ending offers little in the way of resolution, reaffirming the sentiment that perhaps this film isn't all there.

Although the screenplay is pretty dreadful, though based on an interesting idea, and the dialogue mostly either flat or silly, this film still shows Renoir's mastery, particularly in the purely visual field. It still stays with me in flashes, from nearly a lifetime ago. In addition to the director, that fine actor Robert Ryan, with almost nothing to work with, creates a strong impression. Definitely worth seeing with a fair amount of tolerance.

The Woman on the Beach (1947)

An interesting psycho-drama. The plot is a contrivance, limited to one general scene on an ocean beach, where a soldier (Robert Ryan) is struggling with terrible memories of the war. He is apparently in love with one woman but then he meets a far more beguiling and mysterious woman (Joan Bennett), already married to a man who has recently gone blind.

So there are the four characters. Each is loaded with qualities that are plain to see and that guide their decisions in extreme ways. Ryan, as an actor, is not to everyone's taste, but he has grown on me over the years. The stiff posture and equally stiff verbal delivery is laced with feeling, like he's constantly wound up too tight. That's perfect here for a man still tormented by violent dreams and uncertainty in his lonely life.

Bennett plays a kind of woman who isn't quite femme fatale because she isn't quite manipulating Ryan without his knowing, but she has a sinister look and tone to her voice that's terrific. It turns out she hates her husband, not having to do with his blindness, but because he's cruel to her. So it naturally occurs to both Ryan and Bennett in different ways that the blind husband might be dispensable somehow, even if neither is quite prepared for murder.

The husband is given an earthy, almost admirable quality that is wonderfully at odds with how he treats Bennett. And the fourth leading character, the sweet woman who is slowly seeing Ryan slip out of her future, is the one symbol of straight forward simplicity and honesty.

There are scenes along the cliffs, on the stormy waters, at night in the grasses, and in a shipwrecked hull. You feel sometimes that it's almost a play, scripted tightly (too tightly) and staged in a limited physical world (with even the ocean scene seeming constrained in space). But this works, in a way, because you know it's a study of sorts, not a slice of real life. The one real flaw is having the blind man just too able to walk and do things without his eyes, never stumbling, never missing by an inch something he's reaching for.

This movie was a surprise in many ways. I haven't seen one quite like it, and Ryan and Bennett are really both vivid and strangely deep. If the end leaves you unsatisfied, you're not alone. It's too easy, and it shows no psychological insight after all the probing and groping prior. Even so, it's strong enough to work as a stylized piece, an artifice with bits of truth tucked in the edges.