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.

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.

Joan Bennett is "The Woman on the Beach" in this off-center 1947 film also starring Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford. Directed by Jean Renoir, it apparently was badly edited by RKO; thus, it sometimes felt to this viewer as if large sections were omitted.

Robert Ryan plays Scott, a Coast Guard officer with post-traumatic stress from the war. Psychologically, he's a little off balance. I suppose saying "Robert Ryan" and "a little off balance" is saying the same thing, given the roles he played, but there we are. He's set to be married to a lovely woman, Eve, (Nan Leslie), and in fact, urges her to marry him even sooner than planned in an early scene. A few minutes later, he's madly in love with Peggy (Bennett), whom he sees collecting driftwood on the beach near an old wreck. Her husband Tod, it turns out, is a great artist, now blind from a fight with his wife. The two of them have a fairly sick relationship, with Tod apparently tempting Peggy with good-looking young guys to see if she'll cheat on him. At one point during dinner with the couple, Scott passes a lighter across to Peggy and Tod head turns as the flame passes him. When Peggy walks Scott out of the house she says, "No, Scott, you're wrong." So Scott, somewhere in a cut out section, became convinced that Tod can see, tells Peggy, and feels that Tod failed the test. But you have to fill that in because it's not in the movie. It doesn't occur to him, I suppose, that Tod felt the heat of the light. Finally, Scott takes Tod for a walk along the cliffs, determined to find out for once and for all if he can see or not.

The film holds one's interest because of the direction, atmosphere, and performances, but things seem to happen very quickly. Eve complains to Scott that he didn't stop by the night before - which she considers a sign that they are drifting apart - and he tells her that he shouldn't be married. In the film it seems like that happens within 24 hours from the time he wants to get married immediately. Fickle. One suspects another cut.

This is a film about becoming free of obsession, and though some found the end ambiguous, it did seem clear to me that there was some resolution. The three leads are excellent - Bennett and Bickford play a couple with a strong history that has led to a love/hate "Virginia Woolf" type of relationship along with infidelity on her part; Ryan, looking quite young here, is handsome, sincere and gullible as a man who, while trying to break free of his demons, walks into a situation that feeds on them rather than resolves them.

With a more judicious cutting, "The Woman on the Beach" could have been a really fantastic film, with its psychological underpinnings being far ahead of their time. As it is, it's still worth watching, though if I'd been Renoir, I would have been plenty angry at RKO for what was done to this movie.

A film noir from 1947 starring Robert Ryan, Joan Bennett & Charles Bickford. A coast guard officer is tormented, often taking long horse rides on a beach near his command station to whittle away his dire thoughts but one day he comes across a woman whiling her day away in front of a beached ship. It turns out she is the wife of an esteemed artist (who's now blind) who is stuck in a loveless, abusive marriage which intrigues the military man (even though he is promised to another). He believes the artist's impairment is a front which he tries to use to his advantage to take the unhappy woman away from him. A misguided desire has him at the point where he calls off his marriage & to make plans to take the hated husband on an ill fated boat ride during a storm where he hopes to make his fateful move. The last American film by Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game/The Southerner) was hampered by a poor test audience & months of reshoots which by the looks of the final product feels about right since it essentially feels like a compromised classic but still deserves some attention just by the justified notoriety of the filmmaker.

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.