Marilyn at 100: Clash By Night (1952)

Watched:  06/21/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  Second or Third

Director:  Fritz Lang

I'm never going to get over having seen Barton Fink too many times in my younger years.  

Plainly put, the character of Barton Fink is based loosely on the real-life play-write Clifford Odets, who went out to Hollywood to turn his plays about *the common man* into movies.  So every time I see Odets' name on a movie, I kind of know loosely that this will be about the gritty lives of the everyman, and have very particular dialog tics.  Also, I kind of wonder how full of shit this movie really is at its core - not something I generally care about.

Odets strove to capture a sense of at least emotional realism in his plays and movies, setting them not in penthouses and mansions for the New York elite attending shows, but writing plays that took place on the streets below among the working class, seeing their daily struggle as the real poetry.  And I think there's something to that.  

That this film came out of RKO in 1952 is a bit of an eyebrow raiser.  But RKO had this script and they had Fritz Lang as a director and Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan on contract.  And that's a great start.

Stanwyck, who could play literally anything, had hard-scrabble roots in Brooklyn, I believe.  And when she's playing someone working class, I @#$%ing buy it.  She is on fire in this movie as a woman, Mae, who fled her town, a sea-side fishing village in California and returns ten years later after her meal-ticket died (a married politician) and his family kept her from getting the money he left her.  

She's tough as nails and not happy to be home, but she returns to her childhood home, now occupied by her brother, Joe (Keith Andes) and his girlfriend, Peggy (Marilyn Monroe) - a free spirit who works in the cannery.  

Stanwyck immediately runs into a former neighbor, Jerry (Paul Douglas), a fishing ship's captain who is a, shall we say, simple man.  Jerry lives with his aging father and a conniving uncle.  His best pal is Earl Robert Ryan), a braggart who has a lust for life and a wife who is never home - touring as a burlesque dancer.

The basic gist is that Mae marries Jerry for what he represents, not because she loves him.  He's safe and secure, he can provide for her, but he's not her intellectual or emotional match.  However, Earl is there, dark and a bit dangerous and tempting.  

Based on a play, the sets are limited, and the story mostly confined to a few blocks of the fishing village.  The dialog is stylized - intended to sound authentic to someone's ear, so the characters often sound very specific, which is welcome, but you can almost feel the "this dialog is very important" vibe coming off the screen.  And that's fine.  It's just how it feels - not that I've seen a play like this in a few decades, but I recall them.

Lang really doesn't mess around, and while a far cry from his crazier stuff on the unlimited budgets he had in pre-Hitler Germany, he still knows how to tell a story.  He's still operating at a high level visually as well as getting the most from his actors.  But there's also no getting around the mannered performances as the actors bend to the script - with Stanwyck doing the best job of making it feel like natural speech.

The movie is essentially about what it means to find not happiness, but satisfaction, maybe - and therefore the long-term comfort that comes not from settling but seeing what's actually important.  Which is a curious sentiment coming from Hollywood.  The message is "yeah, you can chase your bliss, but where is that really going to get you?  Sometimes you have to work for it, and it's hardly glamorous", which is a message I can get behind.  I just wish it didn't play so close to a very dolled-up Jerry Springer episode, but there you are.

Monroe is also natural here, the younger woman who hasn't been out in the world - both in love with her guy Joe and admiring Mae for having gone out into the world.  She's on the edge of being maybe a bit too wild (in the context of the movie) and Earl has taken a passing fancy in her as well.  

Don't look for her to use her breathy voice here, or giggle.  She's playing a part, but maybe one she understood well - a young woman from a tough background who sees the things she could chase, and she has opportunities just by existing.  The ending of their arc is positively 1950's he-man stuff, but it also is the one guy in the film with any self-respect stating "yeah, you don't get to be with me if you're just waiting until something better comes along - so get out if that's your game" which, of course, makes her fall into his arms.  

It is an interesting script as it does sort of deconstruct the notion that chasing dreams and getting out of town is a good in and of itself.  And it isn't particularly worried about anyone looking like a hero.  But you will get a feeling that this movie walked so other movies would run.  I don't know that I ever got caught up in the movie - I felt like I spent the whole time thinking about the components of the movie rather than just focusing on the story.