The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Film: The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Stars: Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, Nan Leslie, Irene Ryan

Director: Jean Renoir

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

As I mentioned last week, we were not done with Joan Bennett in our month-long tribute to film noir.  Bennett, along with actresses like Lizabeth Scott, Lana Turner, Gene Tierney, & Rita Hayworth, derived much of her fame from in the 1940's specifically from this genre.  Bennett had spent the 1930's being overshadowed by her sister Constance, who was briefly a big name in movies (you'll notice if you look at the bottom of this review they share a "Bennett Sisters" tag on TMROJ), and by the 1940's Joan felt like she was on the way out as a star until The Woman in the Window brought her a big comeback.  That movie changed everything, and suddenly the actress had capital.  By 1947, so important was Bennett to the studio that she actually had some creative control on the movie The Woman on the Beach, where she got to select the film's director, and she went with Jean Renoir, who was struggling to make his identity in American pictures after crafting two of the most celebrated films of all-time in his native France (Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game).  As we'll discuss today, though, Bennett's ability to have this level of control quickly faded as a result of The Woman on the Beach, even though Bennett's celebrity would have a bizarre third act...but first, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Scott (Ryan), a Coast Guard officer who is having nightmares that feature a woman that looks a lot like his girlfriend Eve (Leslie) dying tragically.  Scott initially thinks that marrying her right away will do the trick, but they decide to wait on the engagement a few weeks rather than elope so that Eve can settle her business affairs.  In the meantime, Scott meets Peggy (Bennett), a beautiful woman whom he finds is in a loveless marriage to a blind man named Tod Butler (Bickford) who used to be a genius painter but has since spent his years torturing Peggy in their isolation.  Peggy eventually confesses that in a drunken rage she was the one who blinded Tod, but Scott is not so sure.  He believes that Tod is pretending, and as he has fallen in love with Peggy (casually breaking off his engagement to Eve), he tries to prove it, which leads to him taking Tod to a far away beach, but even when Tod falls off of a cliff, proving he is blind, Scott continues to plot against him, trying to free Peggy so he can have her himself.  The film's showdown is the two men going out on a boat, with Scott intent on killing them both if that's what it takes to free Peggy, but they both live...just long enough for Tod to burn all his paintings, worth a fortune, "freeing" Peggy to leave him because she doesn't have the money he's held as blackmail against her all of these years.  Tod & Peggy, codependent to a fault, embrace, and Scott leaves alone, realizing that it was Tod she loved all along.

The Woman on the Beach is a notable film because it basically ended Jean Renoir's domestic career.  The son of the famed impressionist painter was too ahead-of-his-time for the conventions of American cinema in the 1940's, and when The Woman on the Beach was run by test audiences, they hated its moody looks at loneliness, isolation, and mental health.  Instead, they wanted something sexy & dangerous like what Bennett had been doing the previous years with more traditional film noir like The Woman in the Window.  The film was heavily edited (it's only 71 minutes long), and even with these cuts it was a box office disaster.  Renoir would live another thirty years but would never make another American film for the rest of his career.  Bennett was also reaching the tail end of her film noir career at this point.  Though she'd make a couple more pictures, the most interesting part of her creative career was waning, and she'd eventually find a third act in the early 1950's as the mom in the Father of the Bride movies.  This would end with Bennett's real life turning into a proper noir (her husband would shoot her lover in broad daylight, nearly killing him), but that's a story for another day.

This is all a pity, because The Woman on the Beach is a great movie.  Renoir's moodiness, which in 1947 was too avant-garde for film fans, plays much better in retrospect.  The film plays off of the claustrophobia of Peggy's world, where she is less interested in Scott as a person, and more as a means of escape.  Bennett was really good at these types of characters-playing women that were "unlikeable" to use problematic modern parlance, but the audience could quickly relate to-of course she's going to use Scott, he's her only way out of this personal hell.  Combined with the ugliness of Tod-and-Peggy's relationship with each other, the film talks about how obsession consumes, and the ending, while "happy" in some regards is pretty bleak.  Tod and Peggy are together, but they're now penniless, with their entire fortune (the paintings) burnt to the ground...it's hard to imagine that this ends well for the two of them.  It's a bit hard to judge a movie that clearly had more to say (at least twenty minutes was trimmed from the film), and it's not all good (the Eve subplot could be lifted out without issue), but this was definitely one of my favorite new discoveries of this month's marathon.

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Daisy Kenyon, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat