Marylin Monroe: Clash by Night

The legendary Fritz Lang directed screen goddesses Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe in the 1952 film Clash by Night, and the result unfortunately does not add up to the sum of its pedigreed parts.

The film starts off strongly, with documentary shots gulls, seals and fishermen off the coast of Monterey, California. The sequence is edited so that we are introduced to mechanical workings of the local industry and how the film’s characters fit in with it. Amongst shots of dripping loads of fish being unloaded at the docks, we see Marilyn Monroe rolling out of bed in a tiny apartment to simply pull on a pair of jeans and head to her job in the cannery. It’s the best and most memorable scene in the film, despite lasting only a few seconds. The whole sequence emphasizes the way the community is built around industry and recalls scenes from Lang’s earlier masterpiece Metropolis.

But once Lang gets around to tackling the film’s story, it feels like none of the material really engages him as a filmmaker. It’s obvious that the script was based off of a Broadway play from the way the scenes are staged to the actors’ mostly melodramatic performances. There are some entertaining moments, especially from the supporting cast, but for the most part the film tends to plod ponderously along without much really happening.

This film gets classified on wikipedia as a “drama with some film noir aspects,” but there’s simply not enough noir here to make it interesting. Stanwyck’s character is fond of glumly declaring how she’s damaged and will bring no good to anyone, although we never really find out what happened to make her so morose. I suppose she’s something of a femme fatal, seeing how the men she attracts inevitably end up worse off than they started, but Stanwyck hardly exudes sex appeal in this role and it’s hard to see just what attracts these men to her in the first place. Perhaps their little fishing village is bereft of eligible women? Whatever the case, she makes for one of the dullest femme fatales in cinema.

I suspect it’s Lang’s association with film noir that is responsible for the movie being painted with that brush, and it’s interesting to note that there are multiple mentions of children being lost or kidnapped throughout the film, almost like an echo of Lang’s classic film M. The fact that these disappearances have no bearing on the story or plot of the film only makes them more unsettling. They contribute to a feeling of dread that sort of percolates under the whole movie without ever coming to a boil.

I spent most of the film waiting for something, anything exciting to happen, but the eventual betrayal feels small, petty and, worst of all, anticlimactic considering the long-simmering build up. Even then the plot never really kicks into high gear, and as a result I felt like this film was something of a missed opportunity.