Barbara Stanwyck is so good at playing rough-hewn women--characters with a cynical edge--that it's easy to take her presence here for granted. Once again, she's remarkably fine cast as a tough cookie returning to her hometown along the waterfront and eventually reuniting with her estranged brother. Meanwhile, Marilyn Monroe is fun as a sassy local girl (although her lines sound as if they were looped in post-production) and Paul Douglas is terrific as usual playing a lovestruck skipper. Tempestuous melodrama from director Fritz Lang is decent fare, with heated emotions and florid dialogue, but perhaps more subtlety and nuance would've made it a more memorable picture. **1/2 from ****

Far from vintage Fritz Lang, but still enjoyable in its high-strung melodramatic antics, accentuated in a needlessly symbolic way by the raging of the sea and the clouding over of the sky.

Tough girl Barbara Stanwyck returns to her hometown after ten years of being the mistress of a married man. "Home is where you come, when you run out of places", she says, characteristically". She meets and marries simple, goodhearted fisherman Paul Douglas, but is bored by ordinary married life: "Every day you get a little older, lonelier, stupider", and soon succumbs to her attraction to cynical, boozy movie projectionist Robert Ryan.

The power of 'Clash by Night' lies not in its trite plot or in its overblown imagery, but in the no-nonsense acting of Stanwyck and Ryan, tough as nails but raw at the core. They have an animal eroticism together between them that sparkles like fireworks, but they are also, alas, quite self-pitying.

Many of the bit parts are surprisingly unsavory, but then we also get the young Marilyn Monroe as the naive young girl who hopes to marry Stanwyck's hunky brother, played by Keith Andes, more often than not strutting his naked torso.

The subheading in the IMDb page for "Clash by Night" calls this film noir. Many fans of the genre may be disappointed. It does have one of the great film noir directors in Fritz Lang and stars two of the genres foremost performers in Barbara Stanwyck(DOUBLE INDEMNITY) and Robert Ryan(The Set Up). However, the style is more romantic drama than film noir. It reminds me of the filmed plays by Elia Kazan like "A Streetcar Named Desire". It even has a character screaming a name out the window. I guess the crime element is missing here but I guess infidelity would fit. The dialogue is up to the standard you'd expect a luminary like Clifford Odets to create. I was unsure if I would agree with the way the film ended but the characterization and plot were so well done, I knew that the ending would not disappoint. I was right.