#clash by night

[thecinamonroe]

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Ernest Bachrach, late 1951.

[cressus]

What are you, animals? In a zoo, they keep them in a cage. They keep them apart, they keep them from hurting people, they… Animals. Animals! Animals!

CLASH BY NIGHT (1952) dir. Fritz Lang

[fawnvelveteen]

Marilyn Monroe, Clash By Night, 1952.

[picturessnatcher]

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

[lairreparablefugadeltiempo]

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

[all-action-all-picture]

Battle Action No. 249, dated 15 December 1979. Clash by Night! cover by Cam Kennedy (which came from his own interior art).

This was just a one-off strip but the title is familiar partly due to there being several films with the same name and possibly because of Battle's own unrelated strip, also drawn by Cam Kennedy, titled Clash of the Guards. Treasury of British Comics.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Best Marilyn Monroe movies and performances:

1. All About Eve - Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950)

2. Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder (1959)

3. The Asphalt Jungle - John Huston (1950)

4. O. Henry's Full House - Henry Koster, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Howard Hawks, Henry King (1952)

5. The Misfits - John Huston (1961)

6. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Howard Hawks (1953)

7. The Seven Year Itch - Billy Wilder (1955)

8. Clash by Night - Fritz Lang (1952)

9. Niagara - Henry Hathaway (1953)

10. Monkey Business - Howard Hawks (1952)

[blissfullyawakened97]

 "Home is where you come when you run out of places."

Clash by Night (1952) dir. Fritz Lang

[lifes-commotion]

Robert Ryan

[thecinamonroe]

Marilyn Monroe on the set of ‘Clash By Night’ (1952).

[allaboutstanwyck]

Barbara Stanwyck for Clash by Night, 1952

[mad-prophet-of-the-airwaves]

Clash by Night (1952, Fritz Lang, USA)

[flammentanz]

Regie: Fritz Lang - Directed by Fritz Lang  

[fuckyeahbarbarastanwyck]

[byneddiedingo]

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe, Keith Andes, J. Carrol Naish, Silvio Minciotti. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a play by Clifford Odets. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Roy Webb. There's a wonderful moment in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan) light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck). She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but it's the perfect embodiment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character is hardly ever fully in charge -- Mae Doyle can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.

[lairreparablefugadeltiempo]

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)