Clash By Night will be screened at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) at 6 pm on August 3rd, as part of a summer-long retrospective, Fritz Lang’s America.
“This is a noir vision of a Sirkian Barbara Stanwyck role: the worldly-wise woman trying to make a go of domesticity. Defeated by the city, she returns to her small fishing town and attempts to suppress her sophistication by marrying a goodhearted fisherman, Paul Douglas. But she is drawn into the adulterous net of Robert Ryan, like her, an anguished misfit. The film, adapted from a play by Clifford Odets, has some of the most caustic dialogue of any of the fifties noirs. Visually, Fritz Lang and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca counterpose claustrophobic interiors and documentary-style location shooting of the Monterey sardine fishing industry and Cannery Row. Marilyn Monroe, in one of her first important dramatic roles, takes lessons from sister-in-law Stanwyck on how to be free and then come home ‘when you run out of places.'”
Judy Bloch