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31 utilisateurs sur 40 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Fritz Lang in Malibu, 6 décembre 2003
Auteur : (gleywong@erols.com) de Maryland, USA

Why did Fritz Lang want to make this movie? Did he select the cast? "Clash by Night" was part of the recent TCM tribute to Lang, and following after the early European masterpieces, "Metropolis," and "M," one wonders how much Lang modified and compromised his early filmmaking ideals and style in resettling in Hollywood and jockey for financial support. I've not seen or read the original Odets play on which the film is based, but whatever Lang's reason for choosing it, one has to ask how the finished movie fits into Lang's output, especially the stark, powerful, stylized early pieces. A couple of features stand out: Lang always had a message-- nothing was mere observation -- that shaped the plot and characters' motivations. If Good and Evil stand out too sharply in black and white terms, Lang is still intent on sharp analysis of the turns and twists on the road to Good or Evil. Forces beyond individual characters' control are harnessed and made part of the characters motivations. Then Lang sets them on their inevitable course, and we watch, sometimes in shock or agony.

In "Clash," the imagery-- contrasting shots of sea, clouds, birds,etc, register his endorsement of the natural order of things as Good. In Metropolis, the natural order of humanity toward others was stamped out by the drive for materialism and industrial supremacy, Evil (historically predicating Nazism), symbolized always by the grinding and spouting machinery. All of the characters are tuned to a high pitch and respond with intensity. Lang's style of directing brought out the extremes -- the fortissimos-- in his actors, no matter whom he cast. Lang must have been an extraordinarily demanding director to elicit such razor-edge performances from his actors.

The fact that all the actors in "Clash" are familiar to us from other films meant Lang had to pit them against each other to an even keener degree. They are all desperate for something, whether they reveal it on the surface or not. For an actress like Stanwyck, this was an easily achieved emotional state, and she had to accept the concept of "aging" in her role. If anything, Lang forced her to keep her hard edges up a bit too much, allowing some softening only in the rather quick ending. This bit of character transformation happens only after she sees the true desperation that she's driven Paul Douglas to in the final scene in the film room.

Ah, yes, the film room. If that isn't an obvious set piece, I don't know what is. Ryan, as the third wheel, runs the projectors. Much of his dialogue is double-edged. And Ryan's character is the most desperate, the least yielding, even to Stanwyck, making his profession as a film projectionist ironic and something artificial, compared to the "natural" metier of Douglas and his father's as fishermen. They draw on the bounty of nature and so symbolize -- purposely and obviously -- pure goodness in human nature. Douglas gives a generous, sweet-tough-guy performance that is Ryan's match. Douglas never guesses what temptation he presents to his wife Stanwyck when he casually invites his best friend to stay with them. This generosity extends in particular to his overlooking faults, whether of his leeching uncle or his friend's sarcstic selfishness.

The role of the father, as a link to the Old Country and its solid gold ways is well-placed. His speech at the wedding puts his character in a nutshell: God made love, God made wine, God made friends, let everyone enjoy them, or some such pithy message. For a filmmaker like Lang, and other transplanted Europeans, the sacrifice of deep roots of their heritage and language could only be compensated for by an equally deep absorption of the customs and values of the New Country. Emigré geniuses like Lang, Wilder, or von Stroheim, never left anything behind, they reabsorbed and refashioned their material through their sharp perception of human nature in this new context. I think that is why we feel this movie to be beyond mere melodrama. I couldn't stop watching it -- the characters caught me in their predicament: they reach a universal dimension in the very simplicity and obviousness of their situations and temptations. Lang's role was to push them to that level recognition in themselves.

Even the seemingly secondary characters like Stanwyck's brother and his girlfriend, the latter played surprisingly and delightfully by a young Marilyn Monroe, give strong performances. Marilyn already shows her subtlety and emotional vulnerability. Her spontaneous response to Stanwyck's return to her brother's apartment at the beginning revealed a genuine charm, and she provided a needed sparkle in this otherwise grim film.

So why see "Clash"? Even a secondary work by a master bears his mark, and to see the mark and its features in the context of film history is still a worthwhile effort.

Of Four ****, three ***.

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23 utilisateurs sur 27 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Interesting characters and setting...Stanwyck, Douglas and Ryan are terrific..., 30 avril 2002
Auteur : Neil Doyle de U.S.A.

CLASH BY NIGHT is a melodrama that betrays its stageplay origins with some artful but sometimes arty dialogue that attempts to get us beneath the skin of its three main characters--and occasionally does. But it's a tribute to the acting skill of Stanwyck, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan that their characters come alive with all their flaws and longings exposed.

Barbara is excellent as a woman who returns to a fishing village after a long time away, a bitter, defeated woman still trying to find a niche for herself. Paul Douglas does a remarkably fine job as a good-hearted man, simplistic in nature, who latches onto her only to have her betray him with the lusty Robert Ryan. Lookers on include two very interesting performers--Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe (on her way up). Andes breathes life into the role of Barbara's disgruntled brother and should have been groomed for stardom--he had the looks and appeal of a major star.

A somewhat downbeat ending resolves the conflict--but along the way there are some very high-strung moments from Stanwyck that she plays to perfection. Marilyn Monroe demonstrates talent in a minor role.

A bit talky and stagebound in some scenes--but an interesting melodrama thanks mainly to the gripping performances of Stanwyck, Douglas and Ryan. Ryan would have made a great Stanley Kowalski in 'Streetcar' based on his drunk scene in this one. He can play a brute about as well as anyone and here he's quite an actor, matching Stanwyck's intense performance with a sturdy one of his own.

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19 utilisateurs sur 21 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Bruising Drama, 16 juin 2004
Auteur : Martin Bradley (MOscarbradley@aol.com) de Derry, Irlande

This Fritz Lang film has been largely ignored though in it's way it is as psychologically astute as many of his better known works such as "Scarlett Street". In transposing a Clifford Odets play from New York to a Californian fishing community some of the more florid dialogue seems unnaturally heightened but the performances of the three principals (Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan and particularly Paul Douglas) are stunning and the emotional core of the film is so strong that an audience can feel bruised by what's on screen. The blue collar milieu is perfectly evoked, the black-and-white cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca is first-rate and even the score seems understated, adding to, rather than detracting from the dramatic effect. Essential viewing.

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14 utilisateurs sur 17 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
In a film featuring three of cinema's greatest actors, this is the director's movie. (possible spoilers), 14 février 2001

Auteur : Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) de dublin, ireland

*** Ce commentaire peut contenir des spoilers ***

'Clash by night' opens with images of nature, of birds, seals, the roaring breaks of the sea. These are followed by images of civilisation, of men in boats, business, work, capitalism, taming nature, destroying it - the fish - for hungry civilisation. Lang shows us the process, from fish in the sea, to nets, boats, harbours, the processing factory. Here, then, is the first clash, albeit by daylight, between nature and civilisation.

It is a clash - the harmonious groups of birds and animals disperse in panic at the oncoming boats. But there are points in common - the boats in their symmetrical grouping are like the birds we've just seen; the downward passage of the fish down the assembly line echoes the waves as they stepped onto the beach. Lang dwells on this sequence which seems irrelevant to his narrative because it expresses that narrative with simple, theorem-like clarity. This is a story about the clash between nature and civilisation, desire and duty, past and present, woman and man, individual and community.

Throughout the film, Lang punctuates the histrionics with further images of nature, the clouds engulfing a blazing moon, nature outside expressing what characters feel within, as they find their good intentions bewilderingly submerged by darker, more transgressive impulses. It is a nocturnal clash after all. Another related image, alluded to by Barbara Stanwyk, is that of the bottle, on one level an 'empty' woman needing to be filled with masculine liquid; on another the image of every human as vessel defined by what's inside them.

If the film's story and dialogue are faithful to Clifford Odets, then 'Clash' is the kind of creaky, hokey, 'serious' play Americans thought was important around the middle of the century, with its 'realistic' dialogue punctuated with portentous epigrams; its deliciously downbeat image of 'life; its obvious symbolism and structure, its glorifying of sexual neurosis as a national malaise. I'm not complaining - it's nice to see in the bright, consumerist 50s a work that shows the violence and repression inherent in the smiling nuclear family so vaunted in the period, as well as its artifice and compromise; it's a relief to see sturdy masculinity embodied by drunks, sneaks, dupes and brutes.

There is a heavy strain of self-pity about this last, though, that shows Odets and his times' real fears, a hangover from film noir - the disruptive power of an independent, sexual woman, capable of destroying 'good' men, and the attempts to imprison her in a respectable family unit. Stanwyk and Robert Ryan are defined as loners, even idlers; while Paul Douglas' work is deeply embedded in a communal context, the only industry in the place.

The film begins and ends with Stanwyk coming home, humiliated, defeated, giving away more and more of her freedom. Lang and Stanwyk make her character more sympathetic than the material allows, Lang in particular deepening it with characteristic allusions to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Goethe etc., but Odets seems to agree with Douglas, who calls her an animal. Her desire is linked to the moon (clash by NIGHT, remember), a familiar, misogynistic trope, and hence the sea, whose tide the moon controls. If civilisation is to survive, it has to tame nature, the sea - and woman.

This isn't very interesting material, the rare sight in a Hollywood movie of such a fishing community, and the dark desperate performances being rare plus points on the level of story. But 'Clash' can be enjoyed as an essay in technique from genius filmmaker Lang, as we watch the way he builds the rhythm of each scene, the way he turns the domestic, the home, the safe haven, into a labyrinth, with its maze-like open doorways, through which characters go in and out in self-defeating circles; the way his compositions ironise the material, show what Odets concealed or didn't think about; the way he captures the violent disintegrating of a 'good' man ignorant of the world, in a couple of explosive cuts and close-ups.

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16 utilisateurs sur 21 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
A Late Gem From Lang By Way Of Odets, 23 avril 2001

Auteur : telegonus de brighton, ma

Fritz Lang vastly improves on Clifford Odets' play by giving it legs; also surf, sand, sky and gulls. Barbara Stanwyck returns to the fishing village that hatched her now middle-aged and aimless. Her walk down the street early in the film is of the caliber of Gary Cooper. This is a woman who has lived and breathed pain and frustration all her life, and it shows in everything she does. Stanwyck has never better than she is here, and she dominates the film, vanquishing such heavyweight co-stars as Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, J. Carroll Naish and Marilyn Monroe. Miss Stanwyck does not so much chew the scenery as stroke it; she is magnificent in this movie, which seems almost to flow from her. As her simple, trusting husband Paul Douglas is almost as good; and Robert Ryan nearly steals the show as a sadistic loser who is somehow magnetic, pathetic and yet highly observant, all at the same time. Odets' duologue is pungent and awfully good to hear. He was better than the Barton Fink caricature of several years ago. His lines ooze well thought-out ideas of cruelty and defeat, and his characters live in real, not stage or movie time. The settings are beautifully realized and explored by a very able and mobile cameraman, as for once a house in a movie actually feels lived in, frayed at the edges as real things are. Ryan's drunk scene on the screened porch benefits greatly from the credibility of the setting. Notable too is the seaside bar, which also has a porch, where a long and crucial scene takes place. It is something to see. People are always going up and down stairs in the film, which has an at times forbidding and an at other times engaging sense of the vertical. We get a taste throughout the picture of the lives of working people in the pre-Eisenhower fifties, when television was not yet ubiquitous and women collected their laundry in wicker baskets. Lang and the entire RKO team behind him deserve special praise for their efforts in this film, which frequently has the feel of Edward Hopper without ever actually suggesting the painter's work. Clash By Night offers us one direction the movies might have gone in the postwar period, and didn't. CinemaScope and 3D would sweep the nation the next year, and color was becoming more common. Soon, a specialized arty operation like RKO, which had retained at least some of its talent in the years after Howard Hughes bought the studio, would go the way of the dodo. Not until the seventies, with Scorsese and Mean Streets, would a stylized, individualized view of the real world begin to creep once more into the American film, albeit in a much different key.

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12 utilisateurs sur 14 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Animal eroticism, 3 octobre 2004

Auteur : Michael Bo (michael.bo@pol.dk) de Copenhagen, Danemark

Far from vintage Fritz Lang, but still enjoyable in its high-strung melodramatic antics, accentuated in a needlessly symbolic way by the raging of the sea and the clouding over of the sky.

Tough girl Barbara Stanwyck returns to her hometown after ten years of being the mistress of a married man. "Home is where you come, when you run out of places", she says, characteristically". She meets and marries simple, goodhearted fisherman Paul Douglas, but is bored by ordinary married life: "Every day you get a little older, lonelier, stupider", and soon succumbs to her attraction to cynical, boozy movie projectionist Robert Ryan.

The power of 'Clash by Night' lies not in its trite plot or in its overblown imagery, but in the no-nonsense acting of Stanwyck and Ryan, tough as nails but raw at the core. They have an animal eroticism together between them that sparkles like fireworks, but they are also, alas, quite self-pitying.

Many of the bit parts are surprisingly unsavory, but then we also get the young Marilyn Monroe as the naive young girl who hopes to marry Stanwyck's hunky brother, played by Keith Andes, more often than not strutting his naked torso.

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14 utilisateurs sur 18 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Not Really A Noir, But A Decent Drama With A Different Setting, 16 décembre 2006

Auteur : ccthemovieman-1 de Lockport, NY, Etats-Unis

Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and Marilyn Monore: wow, not a bad leading foursome of actors! I bought this because it was labeled a film noir, and I am always willing to give them a chance. Plus, with this cast, it sounded good. It turned out to be only fair because it was more of a soap opera than a noir. I guess the presence of some amoral people and a lot of wise-cracking lines made it be considered "noir."

The "amoral" people were played by Stanwyck and Ryan, of course.....who else? They are effective in those roles, too, but they should be since those two fine actors played those roles on numerous occasions. Douglas plays the simpleton good guy who gets shafted by his wife Stanwyck who has an affair with Ryan.

Monroe and her boyfriend (played by Keith Andes) have a smaller role but are just as fascinating a couple, of not ore so than the leads. The final third of this movie didn't match up the first two-thirds or this would be rated at least a 9 simply because of the great dialog in that first hour. There were so many good lines I couldn't count them all. I just wish it had stayed that way all the way thorough.

The fishing docks of San Francisco certainly was a different site, too, for a noir. To me, this should be simply classified as a "drama."

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16 utilisateurs sur 22 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
great reminder of when films were made for grownups, 7 avril 2001

Auteur : (sacha_moggy@yahoo.com) de new york, n.y.

clash by night is a great example of what a difference great acting can make. those were the days! story is full of usual cliches, but stanwyck, paul douglas, robert ryan, and a young marilyn monroe: wow!!! and it shows how sexy a film can be without any "sex scenes" or even a hint of nudity.

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13 utilisateurs sur 17 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Another one of Stanwyck's hard-bitten women, 8 décembre 2002

Auteur : moonspinner55 de redlands, ca

Barbara Stanwyck is so good at playing rough-hewn women, characters with a cynical edge, that it's easy to take her presence here for granted. Once again, she is remarkably good as tough cookie returning to her hometown along the waterfront and eventually reuniting with her estranged brother. Marilyn Monroe is also good as a sassy local girl-- although her lines sound as if they were looped in post-production--and Paul Douglas is terrific as a lovestruck skipper. Tempestuous melodrama is decent fare; it has heated emotions and florid dialogue, but perhaps more subtlety and nuance would've made it a more memorable picture. **1/2 from ****

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9 utilisateurs sur 11 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Not really film noir., 26 novembre 2005

Auteur : ram-30 de Dillon, Saskatchewan

The subheading in the IMDb page for "Clash by Night" calls this film noir. Many fans of the genre may be disappointed. It does have one of the great film noir directors in Fritz Lang and stars two of the genres foremost performers in Barbara Stanwyck(DOUBLE INDEMNITY) and Robert Ryan(The Set Up). However, the style is more romantic drama than film noir. It reminds me of the filmed plays by Elia Kazan like "A Streetcar Named Desire". It even has a character screaming a name out the window. I guess the crime element is missing here but I guess infidelity would fit. The dialogue is up to the standard you'd expect a luminary like Clifford Odets to create. I was unsure if I would agree with the way the film ended but the characterization and plot were so well done, I knew that the ending would not disappoint. I was right.

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