THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 441, 5 December 1947, Page 32

THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH

| (RKO-Radio)

S I came away from the theatre I overheard two members of the audience complaining bitterly that they eouldn’t "eet the hane of it

at all." Though not everybody need feel so hopelessly flummoxed, I am afraid that the general verdict on this film is likely to be unfavourable; and it would be sheer affectation to pretend that in this case popular epinion is entirely wrong. Yet though The Woman on the Beach is not a good film, it is in some ways an extremely interesting one -worth seeing as much for what it tries to do, and fails, as for what it succeeds in doing. What it succeeds in doing, in fact, is to spin out an unusual triangular melodrama to am unconvincing climax against a sombre background of sea and sandhills. What it attempts, but does not quite bring off, is to suggest, in terms of film, the perverse spiritual conflict and tortuous motives of a very unhappy trio of characters. Since Jean Renoir was the director, it is to be expected that even his failure is by no means without distinction. . The three frightened or frightening people of the story are a U.S. Coastguardsman (Robert Ryan), who has not yet recovered from ‘the psychological shock. of an encounter with a mine; a beautiful and enigmatic woman (Joan Bennett) who haunts a sinister wreck on the beach and persuades him, against his will, to fall in love with her; and her equally cryptic husband (Charles Bickford), a once-great painter who has gone blind and who seems at one moment to be encouraging the coastguard to make a cuckold of him and at the next to be a furiously jealous sadist. There -is a fourth character, a nice girl (Nan Leslie) whom the coastguard was once: engaged to marry, but who is so straightforward by comparison with the others that she soon ceases to count in the development of the story, though she comes in useful again for supplying a notably unconvincing "happy ending." Often and often Jean Renoir produces a sequence of spiritual uneasiness and mental stress far superior to that encountered in the average psychological thriller of these days. There is, for example, an expertly handled passage where the coastguard, doubting that the painter is really blind, puts his doubt to the test on the edge of a cliff, and another of almost equal tension where the two men quarrel in a small boat in a squally sea. But too often there is an effect of mere artiness; ‘and sometimes the director, straining to be cryptic, manages merely to be ambigu-

| ous or confused.

G.

M.