La donna della spiaggia

A Coast Guard officer gets involved with a strange woman and her blind husband.

Small wonder Renoir went back to France after this Hollywood misfire. I don't know what the backstory is but the movie's a mess, great director or no. The problem pretty much begins and ends with a screenplay that makes next to no sense. Start with motivation-- is Peggy (Bennett) a loving wife who simply strays, or maybe she's just a nympho addicted to sex, or even a masochist who likes pain; or maybe even a woman deeply in love with Tod (Bickford). Unfortunately, there're reasons for any and all of these, thanks to the meandering script.

Then again, considering how changeable human emotions can be, maybe the options are not as mutually exclusive as first appears; maybe Peggy is just really mixed up. Still, it would take a far better script to effectively work out that particular pathology whatever it is. Here, options are simply dumped together into an incoherent jumble. Unfortunately, Tod's character is similarly mangled-- try figuring out, for example, how Tod and Scott (Ryan) really feel about each other. But there's no need to repeat the points other critics have enumerated.

Then there's the staging. In particular, consider the following-- a half-blind(?) Tod tumbles from a 100-foot rocky cliff with only minor head scratches; in a rocking little boat, Tod and Scott stand stock still as the seas rage beside them; at the same time, the two enemies survive after hours of clinging to the roiling wreckage. To me, all of these staging fiascos could be made more credible with better planning.

Fortunately for the movie and us, there are arresting visuals to focus on— the opening nightmare is a stunner, along with the wrecked ship on the beach. Renoir also creates an intense fantasy-like atmosphere with the foggy beach and the ship's grotesque skeleton. Then too, Ryan and Bickford make convincing hard-nosed adversaries. But these upsides are unfortunately not enough to salvage the overall result.

Considering Renoir's previous successes, especially with the lyrically impressive The Southerner (1945), I'm guessing the studio had a dead hand in (mis)shaping the final cut. But, I guess it's also possible that the director-writer was trying to bring some European sophistication to a moody love story that just doesn't work. But whatever the ultimate reason, the movie remains a disappointing muddle.