“Home is where you come when you run out of places.” Barbara Stanwyck delivers the line with flat, burnt-out exhaustion as Mae Doyle, who returns in defeat to Monterey, the fishing town she fled with big ambitions a decade earlier. Fritz Lang and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca introduce the briny, weathered seaside locations and the daily grind of cannery labor with visceral, almost neorealist immediacy. Left-wing screenwriter Alfred Hayes, who had collaborated with Rossellini and De Sica, adapted a 1941 play by Clifford Odets, in which Tallulah Bankhead originated the role of Mae. The film retains Odets’s feverishly overwrought language, which Stanwyck delivers with her usual dry understatement, and his tortured vision of relations between men and women, uncomfortably accepting of male violence. Mae, who warns a suitor that she is “one of those women who are never satisfied,” lays bare the conflict and contradiction within many of Stanwyck’s characters: she wants a man to give her security and protection, yet she cannot abide the empty routine of wife-and-motherhood. So, after marrying a decent but dull fisherman (Paul Douglas), she succumbs to an affair with her husband’s loutish, misogynistic best friend, played by Robert Ryan, seething with a toxic mixture of arrogance and self-loathing. In a cramped, stiflingly hot kitchen the two circle each other like caged tigers. Ryan towers over Stanwyck and manhandles her into a kiss, yet far from looking overpowered, it is she who leaves the most scorching physical impression, shoving her hands into Ryan’s undershirt and grabbing at his muscular back. Sharing the screen with Marilyn Monroe, refreshingly natural in one of her earliest featured roles, the 45-year-old Stanwyck still radiates sexuality. Clash by Night stops one crime short of film noir, but portrays a world as bleak as that in Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, from which Odets took the title: drowning in loneliness, jealousy, betrayal, and disappointment.

Imogen Sara Smith