There’s a major event tonight at Film Forum: a screening of Jean Renoir’s last Hollywood feature, “The Woman on the Beach,” from 1947, starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan. It’s followed by a discussion with Victoria Wilson, the film historian; Shelley Wanger, a book editor who is the daughter of Bennett and the movie’s producer, Walter Wanger; and Peter Davis, a director who is the son of Frank Davis, who wrote the script with Renoir.
The movie, an atmospheric and harsh film noir, has long been a favorite of mine, for its depiction of a peculiar triangle that bristles with symbolic power. A Second World War veteran (Robert Ryan) who suffers from post-traumatic stress, including nightmares of a torpedoed and sinking ship and his own near-drowning, works as a Coast Guard officer in a small seaside community. In his lonely waterfront wanderings, he meets, amid ruins, a glossy and brooding woman (Joan Bennett). There’s an instant erotic spark between them, and she invites him to her cottage. There, he meets her husband (Charles Bickford), a formerly well-regarded painter who is now blind—and who possessively brings the young man into the household for company. But the brewing romance between the youngsters (not to spoil the plot) is troubled by an ugly element of backstory between husband and wife.
Writing about the film in the magazine, I call attention to analogies between the plot and the experiences of Renoir as a young man—and as the son of his father, the painter. It’s worth noting that, in 1962, Renoir fils published a book of reminiscences—“Renoir, My Father”—on which he was already working at the time that he made “The Woman on the Beach.” In his biography of the filmmaker, Pascal Mérigeau traces the troubles that beset the production of the film: modifications to the script because of the Hays Code, a disastrous test screening that resulted in drastic reshoots (including the recasting of a major supporting role) and reëditing, and Renoir’s own unhappiness with the large investment of time in what was supposed to be a rapid production. The original, test-screening version hasn’t survived. The film that exists has a dreadful, oneiric allure that bursts with a dark brilliance into an emotional and artistic apocalypse. It’s one of the great endings, one that foreshadows, remarkably, that of another noir classic, “Kiss Me Deadly,” directed by Robert Aldrich, who was Renoir’s assistant director on “The Woman on the Beach.”
One of the fascinating things about this movie is that it was made in Hollywood. For all the restrictions placed on Renoir by studio self-censorship and studio politics, it’s hard to imagine the filmmaker alluding so blatantly to his own youth, his own first marriage, and his own father had he been working in France. Similarly, his prior American film, “Diary of a Chambermaid,” set in nineteenth-century France, alludes to the rise of homegrown French fascism and its vestiges in a way that might have been tough to do in France at the time. They’re noteworthy works in a distinctive genre: that of movies made by directors outside their home country and/or in a language that’s not their first.
Of course, Hollywood has always been a community of notable émigrés, whether Charlie Chaplin or Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau or Alfred Hitchcock, and the rise of Hitler accelerated the influx of foreign-born directors who nourished the industry with their art. Their outsiders’ perspective has much to do with the incisive and often critical view of American life in movies of the time. But the genre I mean is the one-off or brief parenthesis in a long career. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami filmed “Certified Copy” in Italy and “Like Someone in Love” in Japan, where he was free, as he isn’t in Iran, to film relations between men and women frankly. François Truffaut filmed “Fahrenheit 451” in English and had a miserable time of it. Michelangelo Antonioni followed the swing of media modernity to London and California for “Blow-Up” and “Zabriskie Point.” Ingmar Bergman stayed home and filmed Elliott Gould, a raging bull, in Sweden in “The Touch.” Jean-Luc Godard filmed Norman Mailer, Peter Sellars, Molly Ringwald, and Burgess Meredith in “King Lear.” Roberto Rossellini made an early excursion to devastated Berlin for “Germany Year Zero,” and another to India for “India Matri Bhumi.” And it’s no surprise that Sofia Coppola found her directorial voice in Japan, with “Lost in Translation.”
When speaking a foreign language with less-than-native command, one somehow manages to express something, even when what emerges is something other than what’s intended. The language loses its transparency and serves as a sort of mask that, like at a costume ball, helps override inhibitions and liberate desires and impulses. Though he walked away from Hollywood, Renoir remained a resident of California for the rest of his life. He filmed “The River” in India, then travelled to France for another run of masterworks—including “The Golden Coach,” “French Cancan,” “Elena and the Men,” “The Testament of Dr. Cordelier,” and “Picnic in the Grass”—that may owe a measure of their merit to his self-aware distance: he rendered himself, in effect, a foreigner at home.
Credit: Photofest/Film Forum.
