Auteur of one of the supremely great works of world cinema, La Regle du jeu (Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir, like so many other European masters, found less than a stellar career in Hollywood. Though several of his French films were remade as American noirs, he directed but one installment of the cycle himself: The Woman on the Beach. And, though routinely butchered by the studio before release, the movie soon establishes itself as something quite out of the ordinary in fact, something close to extraordinary.
After recuperation from physical and psychological trauma during the war, Robert Ryan finds himself stationed at a sleepy Coast Guard outpost on the California coast. He's restless and diffident about his upcoming marriage to a local girl. One day on the fog-shrouded strand he encounters a beautiful woman (Joan Bennett) gathering driftwood. He walks her back to her beach shack where a two-edged friction starts to develop. Suddenly in walks her husband (Charles Bickford), who was blinded by Bennett in a drunken accident years before; though no longer able to work, he's still reckoned the greatest painter in the world. (Renoir's father, of course, was the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir.)
Ostensibly glad to have a guest, Bickford insists on Ryan's promising a return visit. But as the flickers of attraction he feels toward Bennett kindle into lust, Ryan begins to wonder if Bickford is really blind, or as blind as he claims; he also starts to chafe at being drawn into the murky and perverse games the couple seems to enjoy playing. Determined to prove once and for all that Bickford is sighted, he one day leads him nearer and nearer the edge of a bluff....
Like Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (which also starred Ryan), The Woman on the Beach deserves its noir label more from disturbing mood and freighted ambiguity than from its storyline (it's by no means a conventional suspense drama). He inspires his principal cast to superlative performances, especially Bickford (in a role reminiscent of Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark). Bennett, one of the early icons of the noir cycle, attracted the attention of two other illustrious European movie-makers, Lang and Max Ophuls. But Renoir may have directed her in the finest work of her career as this self-described "tramp" embroiled in a marriage kept together by hate as much as love. And there's Ryan's signature blend of short-sightedness and roiling anger, which he has done elsewhere, but nobody save maybe Brando did more convincingly.
The unusual score, too by the German Communist `serious' composer Hanns Eisler betokens that this production's ambitions are very high indeed. If The Woman on the Beach falls just short of `masterpiece' status, blame must fall on RKO for meddling with what Renoir delivered, fretful that situations and innuendos that Europeans regularly took in their stride might be too naughty for Americans those Americans who had, after all, just fought and won a war. Even hacked down to a measly 71 minutes, Renoir's vision keeps its haunting, incantatory power.
