The title of Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night and its placement
in his filmography might lead you to expect a film noir, and a couple of its
characters (played by Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan) express themselves
almost entirely through noir-soaked barbs and aphorisms, reflecting the
tortured worldviews beneath. But they’re heavily displaced from noir territory
(Ryan’s character works as a projectionist, a neat evocation of such
displacement), set down in a fishing village, both reeling from recent bumpy emotional
rides. The film starts by immersing us in the ships, the unloading of the
catch, the processing, the surrounding culture, and never loses its sense of
that setting; at other times, in its growing sense of domesticity as prison and
in the expressiveness of its interiors, it feels like Douglas Sirk as much as Lang.
Despite her better judgment, Stanwyck’s May gives in to the pursuit of fishing
captain Jerry (Paul Douglas), a man too decently straightforward to arouse her interest, and
tries to make it as a wife and mother; it’s inevitable that his self-loathing
friend Earl (Ryan) will eventually constitute a more interesting proposition.
The movie teems with portrayals of flawed masculinity – old drunks, younger men
with overly fixed ideas about what they expect of their women; it also has
Marilyn Monroe as Stanwyck’s main female confidant, astute enough to see her
point of view, but not to avoid similar traps. Whether one categorizes it as
noir or domestic melodrama or an amalgam of both, it’s a compellingly
articulated study, with a “happy” ending (at least in the sense that it tends
to the imperatives of domesticity and continuity over those of uncertain
desire) so compromised and understated that it allows no clear winners. In this
sense, as in Lang’s greatest films, the implications run wide and deep, to a
clash and a night that may never end.
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