La Femme sur la plage

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.

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.

Jean Renoir was a fascinating director, but this one has holes in it, despite a classic "beach" mood. Robert Ryan, one of our most underrated actors, looks perfect but seems miscast in this one. Joan Bennett (I've never quite gotten her appeal) seems lost, although she was perfect in the two Fritz Lang films (Scarlett Street & Woman in the Window). Best performance = Charles Bickford as the blind painter-husband. I know there were problems with editing this at the time, but I kept hoping for more.

A 6 out of 10. Too much blasting music, but great cinematography. Irene Ryan (Granny Clampett) has a supporting role, and I believe this is the first film I've seen her in. A great director, but I just couldn't grab onto this film.

`Woman on the Beach' could have been a much better film; that's the tragedy of it. There's meat in this soup of a movie-mainly because of the performances of Charles Bickford and Joan Bennett. But the rest of it is awfully weak, including, somewhat surprisingly, Robert Ryan. The main failures are the screenplay and the score. The latter can be forgiven, although it's so heavy as to be intrusive, but the former is full of holes that leave the viewer baffled.

I've seen the film three times now and I'm still trying to figure out what exactly happened to Ryan in his career during the war (Navy? Coast Guard? As a previous reviewer here suggested, it's weirdly unclear what Ryan's duties were before and after the war) and what is supposed to be wrong with him.

The secondary characters seem to have wandered into the noirish landscape from a Ma and Pa Kettle film and frankly I'm not all that surprised that Ryan seems ambivalent about marrying good girl, Nan Leslie. Renoir doesn't seem to have known just what genre of a film he was making. We go from the woman's film to film noir to hokey comedy and back again. Irene Ryan is wildly out of place and her performance is over the top in the worst kind of way.

But the gems in this film are Bennett and Bickford. Their characters' seamy, violent, sado-masochistic relationship is riveting and you can't help but wish that Renoir had spent more time focusing on it and less on the antics of the Wernecke brood. Joan Bennett usually needed good material (`Scarlet Street', `The Reckless Moment', `The Woman in the Window') to shine, but she does quite well here, particularly in her scenes with Bickford. There's also a wonderful moment where Ryan is beginning to realize that she isn't quite the put-upon little woman he thought she was. Her reaction is worth suffering through scenes about chocolate cake and the decorations at the coast guard station.

Charles Bickford is fabulous as the blinded, bitter and jealous artist, easily outshining the usually excellent Robert Ryan, who appears merely dazed and confused. This was the film that got me interested in Bickford's career. I've yet to find the movie where he isn't excellent.