Sadly Over-hyped

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Absolutely the worst movie.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Woman on the Beach (1947)An interesting psycho-drama. The plot is a contrivance, limited to one general scene on an ocean beach, where a soldier (Robert Ryan) is struggling with terrible memories of the war. He is apparently in love with one woman but then he meets a far more beguiling and mysterious woman (Joan Bennett), already married to a man who has recently gone blind.So there are the four characters. Each is loaded with qualities that are plain to see and that guide their decisions in extreme ways. Ryan, as an actor, is not to everyone's taste, but he has grown on me over the years. The stiff posture and equally stiff verbal delivery is laced with feeling, like he's constantly wound up too tight. That's perfect here for a man still tormented by violent dreams and uncertainty in his lonely life. Bennett plays a kind of woman who isn't quite femme fatale because she isn't quite manipulating Ryan without his knowing, but she has a sinister look and tone to her voice that's terrific. It turns out she hates her husband, not having to do with his blindness, but because he's cruel to her. So it naturally occurs to both Ryan and Bennett in different ways that the blind husband might be dispensable somehow, even if neither is quite prepared for murder.The husband is given an earthy, almost admirable quality that is wonderfully at odds with how he treats Bennett. And the fourth leading character, the sweet woman who is slowly seeing Ryan slip out of her future, is the one symbol of straight forward simplicity and honesty. There are scenes along the cliffs, on the stormy waters, at night in the grasses, and in a shipwrecked hull. You feel sometimes that it's almost a play, scripted tightly (too tightly) and staged in a limited physical world (with even the ocean scene seeming constrained in space). But this works, in a way, because you know it's a study of sorts, not a slice of real life. The one real flaw is having the blind man just too able to walk and do things without his eyes, never stumbling, never missing by an inch something he's reaching for.This movie was a surprise in many ways. I haven't seen one quite like it, and Ryan and Bennett are really both vivid and strangely deep. If the end leaves you unsatisfied, you're not alone. It's too easy, and it shows no psychological insight after all the probing and groping prior. Even so, it's strong enough to work as a stylized piece, an artifice with bits of truth tucked in the edges.

The distinguished French director Jean Renoir beaches himself on American shores in less than graceful style with this flatly performed melodramatic noir that involves post traumatic stress and infidelity. While Renoir manages to keep the suspense building with character ambiguity he does so at the expense of draining the emotional realism from them.Scott (Robert Ryan), a coastguard officer is haunted by nightmares of a ship sinking he survived. In an attempt to move on he proposes to his girl friend who does not want to rush into things. Riding his horse along the shore one day he encounters Peggy (Joan Bennett), who lives near bye with her blind artist husband, Todd (Charles Bickford). Confused and vulnerable the pair enter into a passionate affair.With the character of Peggy as his linchpin Renoir presents us with an ideal fatale; mysterious beautiful and dangerous. Her ambiguity is key to the suspenseful nature of the film but Joan Bennett is too icily remote and unconvincing in her passion for Scott or Todd turning her feelings on and off like a faucet. Ryan and Bickford for the most part circle each other like wounded animals challenging and looking for an opportunity to strike. Both are so bitter they make it hard to believe they have any love in them.Given it's brief running time (71 min.) and its choppy narrative Woman on the Beach may not be the film Renoir intended. All three wax existential in brief moments of metaphorical intent but the conversation rapidly turns to rage and irrationality much of the time as Renoir employs excessive zooms and a overheated music score to give Woman a B movie style of haphazard excess. The tacked on compromise to salvage this shipwreck makes it only sink deeper.

Joan Bennett is "The Woman on the Beach" in this off-center 1947 film also starring Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford. Directed by Jean Renoir, it apparently was badly edited by RKO; thus, it sometimes felt to this viewer as if large sections were omitted.Robert Ryan plays Scott, a Coast Guard officer with post-traumatic stress from the war. Psychologically, he's a little off balance. I suppose saying "Robert Ryan" and "a little off balance" is saying the same thing, given the roles he played, but there we are. He's set to be married to a lovely woman, Eve, (Nan Leslie), and in fact, urges her to marry him even sooner than planned in an early scene. A few minutes later, he's madly in love with Peggy (Bennett), whom he sees collecting driftwood on the beach near an old wreck. Her husband Tod, it turns out, is a great artist, now blind from a fight with his wife. The two of them have a fairly sick relationship, with Tod apparently tempting Peggy with good-looking young guys to see if she'll cheat on him. At one point during dinner with the couple, Scott passes a lighter across to Peggy and Tod head turns as the flame passes him. When Peggy walks Scott out of the house she says, "No, Scott, you're wrong." So Scott, somewhere in a cut out section, became convinced that Tod can see, tells Peggy, and feels that Tod failed the test. But you have to fill that in because it's not in the movie. It doesn't occur to him, I suppose, that Tod felt the heat of the light. Finally, Scott takes Tod for a walk along the cliffs, determined to find out for once and for all if he can see or not.The film holds one's interest because of the direction, atmosphere, and performances, but things seem to happen very quickly. Eve complains to Scott that he didn't stop by the night before - which she considers a sign that they are drifting apart - and he tells her that he shouldn't be married. In the film it seems like that happens within 24 hours from the time he wants to get married immediately. Fickle. One suspects another cut.This is a film about becoming free of obsession, and though some found the end ambiguous, it did seem clear to me that there was some resolution. The three leads are excellent - Bennett and Bickford play a couple with a strong history that has led to a love/hate "Virginia Woolf" type of relationship along with infidelity on her part; Ryan, looking quite young here, is handsome, sincere and gullible as a man who, while trying to break free of his demons, walks into a situation that feeds on them rather than resolves them.With a more judicious cutting, "The Woman on the Beach" could have been a really fantastic film, with its psychological underpinnings being far ahead of their time. As it is, it's still worth watching, though if I'd been Renoir, I would have been plenty angry at RKO for what was done to this movie.

After sitting through this film in total bemusement I turned to the eight comments posted here in search of anything that may help me make sense of it. There seems to be a consensus that Renoir suffered a touch of the Orson Welles' inasmuch as a potential masterpiece was butchered by the studio. There may be grounds for asserting the studio did in fact cut the film extensively but I could detect no evidence whatsoever that this was a potential Magnificent Ambersons. I'm an admirer of Renoir but I had to work awfully hard to detect his hand in even one frame of this noir manque. By coincidence I saw it within 24 hours of another noir film set largely out of doors in daylight and made by a Frenchman albeit set in America but Jacques Tourneur's Build My Gallows High is light years ahead of this whilst compared to Renoir over the long haul Tourneur is very much second-string. Like Gallows the protagonist - respectively Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan - begins his cinematic life betrothed to a wholesome Doris Day substitute but is soon seduced by a femme fatale - Jane Greer and Joan Bennett - but that's about as far as comparison will take us. Unlike Gallows Renoir never permits the noir world to fully intrude and eclipse the healthy environment in which the protagonist is discovered so that we're constantly reminded of 'normal' life even as Ryan is drawn deeper and deeper into the whirlpool surrounding Bennett and her blind painter - a very crude metaphor for impotence - husband Charles Bickford. All three principals give it their best shot but the problem was they never knew which target - thriller, suspenser, drama, melodrama - they were aiming at.