People are voting emotionally.

Let's be realistic.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

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.

Film noir is all about a narrator losing control of his story and succumbing to hallucination. French critics were the first to identify it because they had their own tradition of this, the silent films of Epstein, Kirsanoff, L'Herbier, rich in inwards reflection and confused mind. Later Duvivier and others. So this does nothing new for noir, but is amazingly effective because it comes by the hand of someone who has lived in his films, so quite deeply, the transition from dream to the light of day. Rules is just not my kind of film, it's too fussy. But remember, Renoir started in the impressionistic style of the 20's and artistically grew up in his father's paintings and Epstein's cinema. It pays off in this small film here.The plot is that a man has come back from the war, a happy life ahead of him. He can't wait to get married, and what would be more sensible than that. But something is not quite right with him, his body is doing fine but other wounds have not healed.Our first scene of him, is where he sinks to the bottom of a dream which is a woman beckoning. This is what's all about here, visions from a confused mind. Debris and shatters the war has left in his soul are dragging him down. He wants freedom from all that. Deep down, he wants frothy sex that floats and not the deep pull of marriage.Next to a shipwreck on a windswept beach he encounters the dreamy woman with flowing raven hair. It turns out she's the unhappy wife of a blind painter and they both share a desire to be free to explore again.Now you can call the noir plot in advance, deceit and all that, you wouldn't be wrong, but it's the French touch that matters. It's Renoir's blind painter who guides the vision here, blind but has finetuned other subtler senses to experience the world.he begins to dictate something about goodness not being inherent in man, but trails off, dismayed that bare words can ever provide real in-sight. No, we need images of soul.you don't need to think what a painting is all about, he muses, you just have to trust the eye to see.but see, it was a night of wild passion, unchecked desire, that cost him his 'sight'. The damage of the eyes is so deep, he cannot even tell 'light from dark'.he clings to paintings that could make him rich, including a portrait of the wife, because it's the only memory left.It's all so clearly reflected here, evocatively framed between high cliffs and a tempest at sea. The beach as shared wounded soul. The masterful touch is that our man is not convinced of the blindness, believes it's all a put-on for spite or control, which is the deeper noir mechanism, refusal to believe that unbridled desire can blind you. It ends with a burning house, a proper vision. We can surmise that, having 'seen', having had in-sight of the delusional chimera they both were chasing, they are cleansed to go back to healthy relationships.A tantalizing prospect is getting to imagine the film in its complete state, what we have exists in a meager 71m version.RKO rolled in and once more butchered a film. However, we don't have any of the ambiguous perturbations caused on the reality of the film by removing parts of it that happened in the case of Welles, what I term the Ambersons effect, my guess is this is the result of not simply recutting for continuity but actually reshooting parts of the film. So it fully makes sense the way we have it.Still, who knows what RKO deprived us of. My guess is they cut off a lot of richly reflected poetry and dream scenery from the beach and sea. You can fill in on that by watching Epstein's Le Tempestaire, released that same year. It's layered just so to fit right in here: a woman stares out at sea worried for her fisherman boyfriend, an old woman warns of a portentous tempest rushing from behind the skies. It's one of the best films I have seen.

I agree with the reviewer who found Charles Bickford's performance as the blind painter as the most compelling and best done. But then, Tod, the artist, is the only one of the three main characters who motivations and personality are clear. His much younger, beautiful wife, played by attractive brunette Joan Bennett, is held captive by him in an emotionally and physically abusive way. At the same time, she finds herself powerless to leave him, though she finds the psychologically injured Navy vet Robert Ryan, who dreams of walking underwater toward a beautiful sea nymph who resembles her, very attractive.Ryan's character is the biggest puzzle. We can perhaps understand the young wife's clinging to her aging, blind husband out of guilt. After all, it was she who apparently severed his optic nerve during a drunken argument some time ago, though how she managed this without a scalpel is unclear. There are no marks on the painter's face, leaving one to wonder if the cause of blindness is not psychological, or indeed metaphorical. But Ryan's murderous stupidity when he twice comes close to killing the blind painter are only pardonable under the assumption that Ryan is so stress inflicted from his war experiences that he is innocent of even a murder attempt. I didn't buy it, and nor do I see how the movie's conclusion begins to resolve Ryan's obvious mental issues.

***SPOILERS*** Shell shocked as well as water logged navy man Let. Scott Brunnet, Robert Ryan, has never gotten over his experience in WWII when his ship was hit by a German undersea mine and sank. Trying to get his head together Scott in charge of a Coast Guard station on the Atlantic coast takes daily rides along the beach on his horse and one day runs into Peggy, Joan Bennett, picking up woods from an abandoned ship wreck. During a friendly talk with her Peggy, as if she were psychic, has the surprised Scott analyzed down to the tee about his past and the hang-ups he developed from his WWII experiences.Invited into Peggy's home Scott finds out, when he shows up unexpectedly, that her husband Tod, Charles Brickford, is a world renowned artist as well as being blind. Tod takes an immediate liking to Scott almost inviting him to stay overnight even though he has to report back to his Coast Guard station within the hour. It's then that the film takes on an almost surreal look with Scott becoming so obsessed with Peggy that he virtually leaves his totally crazy about him girlfriend Eve,Nan Laslie, at the altar and falls crazily in love with Peggy, a married woman.The relationship between Peggy and Tod is by far the most interesting element in the film with her feeling guilty for the condition that he found himself in. We, and Scott, find out from Peggy that she go into a drunken fight with Tod and broke a bottle over his head resulting in him ending up blind. It's the fact of Tod's blindness that Peggy stayed and put up with his abuse of her feeling guilty that she took away the one love that he had in the world; eyes to both see and paint with.The rest of the film has Scott and Tod play this weird game of chicken with Scott trying to prove that Tod isn't really blind in order to free Peggy from his clutches and keep her all for himself. Scott's actions are so outrageous that he almost has Tod killed twice in the film, by falling off a cliff and drowning in an Alantic storm, the second time with Scott almost getting killed along with.Tod soon realizes that it's his paintings that has him going somewhat insane with his obsessive actions towards both them and Peggy and finally decides to burn them in order to set himself and Peggy free. Being blind Tod in trying to set the painting on fire sets his and Peggy's house on fire as well leaving himself homeless and penniless with only the clothes, and his car, on his back. The film ends with Peggy realizing that Tod needs her more then ever leaves Scott standard on the beach, watching her and Tod's house burn to a crisps, and agree to drive back with Tod to New York to start a new life. As for Scott we can assume that he'll now go back to Eve whom he promised to marry earlier in the movie, that's if she'll be willing to take him back in the first place.