'Clash by night' opens with images of nature, of birds, seals, the roaring breaks of the sea. These are followed by images of civilisation, of men in boats, business, work, capitalism, taming nature, destroying it - the fish - for hungry civilisation. Lang shows us the process, from fish in the sea, to nets, boats, harbours, the processing factory. Here, then, is the first clash, albeit by daylight, between nature and civilisation.
It is a clash - the harmonious groups of birds and animals disperse in panic at the oncoming boats. But there are points in common - the boats in their symmetrical grouping are like the birds we've just seen; the downward passage of the fish down the assembly line echoes the waves as they stepped onto the beach. Lang dwells on this sequence which seems irrelevant to his narrative because it expresses that narrative with simple, theorem-like clarity. This is a story about the clash between nature and civilisation, desire and duty, past and present, woman and man, individual and community.
Throughout the film, Lang punctuates the histrionics with further images of nature, the clouds engulfing a blazing moon, nature outside expressing what characters feel within, as they find their good intentions bewilderingly submerged by darker, more transgressive impulses. It is a nocturnal clash after all. Another related image, alluded to by Barbara Stanwyk, is that of the bottle, on one level an 'empty' woman needing to be filled with masculine liquid; on another the image of every human as vessel defined by what's inside them.
If the film's story and dialogue are faithful to Clifford Odets, then 'Clash' is the kind of creaky, hokey, 'serious' play Americans thought was important around the middle of the century, with its 'realistic' dialogue punctuated with portentous epigrams; its deliciously downbeat image of 'life; its obvious symbolism and structure, its glorifying of sexual neurosis as a national malaise. I'm not complaining - it's nice to see in the bright, consumerist 50s a work that shows the violence and repression inherent in the smiling nuclear family so vaunted in the period, as well as its artifice and compromise; it's a relief to see sturdy masculinity embodied by drunks, sneaks, dupes and brutes.
There is a heavy strain of self-pity about this last, though, that shows Odets and his times' real fears, a hangover from film noir - the disruptive power of an independent, sexual woman, capable of destroying 'good' men, and the attempts to imprison her in a respectable family unit. Stanwyk and Robert Ryan are defined as loners, even idlers; while Paul Douglas' work is deeply embedded in a communal context, the only industry in the place.
The film begins and ends with Stanwyk coming home, humiliated, defeated, giving away more and more of her freedom. Lang and Stanwyk make her character more sympathetic than the material allows, Lang in particular deepening it with characteristic allusions to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Goethe etc., but Odets seems to agree with Douglas, who calls her an animal. Her desire is linked to the moon (clash by NIGHT, remember), a familiar, misogynistic trope, and hence the sea, whose tide the moon controls. If civilisation is to survive, it has to tame nature, the sea - and woman.
This isn't very interesting material, the rare sight in a Hollywood movie of such a fishing community, and the dark desperate performances being rare plus points on the level of story. But 'Clash' can be enjoyed as an essay in technique from genius filmmaker Lang, as we watch the way he builds the rhythm of each scene, the way he turns the domestic, the home, the safe haven, into a labyrinth, with its maze-like open doorways, through which characters go in and out in self-defeating circles; the way his compositions ironise the material, show what Odets concealed or didn't think about; the way he captures the violent disintegrating of a 'good' man ignorant of the world, in a couple of explosive cuts and close-ups.
