Clash by Night is a romantic triangle drama by Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...

 which premiered on Broadway in 1941 and was later adapted to film and television. The title derives from Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

's poem "Dover Beach

Dover Beach

"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849...

" (1867):

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Broadway

The title carried a certain irony when Odets' play, produced by Billy Rose

Billy Rose

William "Billy" Rose was an American impresario, theatrical showman and lyricist. He is credited with many famous songs, notably "Me and My Shadow" , "It Happened in Monterey" and "It's Only a Paper Moon"...

, debuted on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. Directed by Lee Strasberg

Lee Strasberg

Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...

, the production opened December 27, 1941 and ran for a total of 49 performances before closing on February 7, 1942.

Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...

 and Lee J. Cobb

Lee J. Cobb

Lee J. Cobb was an American actor. He is best known for his performance in 12 Angry Men his Academy Award-nominated performance in On the Waterfront and one of his last films, The Exorcist...

 headed the cast as Mae and Jerry Wilenski with Katherine Locke

Katherine Locke

Katherine Locke was a Broadway actress in the late 1930s. She was born in Kalakenchu, Russia and raised in the U.S. She appeared in films in the 1940s and 1950s as a supporting actress...

 as Peggy Coffey and Joseph Schildkraut

Joseph Schildkraut

Joseph Schildkraut was an Austrian stage and film actor.-Early life:Born in Vienna, Austria, Schildkraut was the son of stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut. The younger Schildkraut moved to the United States in the early 1900s. He appeared in many Broadway productions...

 as Earl Pfeiffer. Boris Aronson

Boris Aronson

Boris Aronson was an American scenic designer for Broadway and Yiddish theatre. He won the Tony Award for Scenic Design six times in his career.-Biography:...

 designed the setting of the Wilenski home on Staten Island

Staten Island

Staten Island is a borough of New York City, New York, United States, located in the southwest part of the city. Staten Island is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull, and from the rest of New York by New York Bay...

 in the summer of 1941. While Robert Ryan

Robert Ryan

Robert Bushnell Ryan was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.-Early life and career:...

 was acting in a 1941 summer stock production of A Kiss for Cinderella with actress Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer is a former German film actress. Known as The "Viennese Teardrop", she was the first woman to win two Academy Awards, and the first person to win them consecutively. She was discovered by MGM talent scouts while acting on stage in Austria and Germany and after appearing in Austrian...

, he was seen by Odets (Rainer's ex-husband), who offered him the juvenile role of Joe Doyle in Clash by Night. Others in the cast were Seth Arnold, Ralph Chambers, Stephan Eugene Cole, Harold Grau, John F. Hamilton, William Nunn, Joseph Shattuck and Art Smith.

Despite the short run on Broadway, the play was published by Random House in 1942.

Film

When the play was adapted to film a decade later by screenwriter Alfred Hayes, the setting was changed from Staten Island to Monterey, California

Monterey, California

The City of Monterey in Monterey County is located on Monterey Bay along the Pacific coast in Central California. Monterey lies at an elevation of 26 feet above sea level. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 27,810. Monterey is of historical importance because it was the capital of...

, and the character names were altered from Wilenski to D'Amato. Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...

 directed the 1952 black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 film noir

Film noir

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

/drama, Clash by Night

Clash by Night

Clash by Night is a black-and-white drama with some film noir aspects, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Ryan. The movie was based on the play by Clifford Odets, adapted by writer Alfred Hayes...

, starring Barbara Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...

, Paul Douglas

Paul Douglas (actor)

Paul Douglas was an American actor, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as Paul Douglas Fleischer.-Career:...

, Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....

 and Robert Ryan. By this time, Ryan had outgrown the juvenile role of Joe Doyle and instead co-starred as Earl Pfeiffer, the role Joseph Schildkraut created on Broadway. In the film's storyline, Mae Doyle D'Amato (Stanwyck) returns to her home in a small town and a love triangle develops between Mae, fisherman Jerry D'Amato (Douglas) and film projectionist Earl Pfeiffer (Ryan), even though Mae and Jerry have a baby together. A subplot covers the blossoming romance between Peggy (Monroe) and Joe Doyle (Keith Andes

Keith Andes

Keith Andes was an American film, radio, musical theatre, stage and television actor.-Early life:John Charles Andes was born in Ocean City, New Jersey on July 12, 1920. By the age of 12, he was featured on the radio....

). Others in the cast included Silvio Minciotti as Papa D'Amato and J. Carrol Naish

J. Carrol Naish

Joseph Patrick Carrol Naish was an American character actor born in New York City. Naish was twice nominated for an Academy Award for film roles, and he later found fame in the title role of CBS Radio's Life With Luigi , which was also on CBS Television .Naish appeared on stage for several years...

 as Uncle Vince.

Television

Five years after the movie, the Odets play was adapted for television. John Frankenheimer

John Frankenheimer

John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films...

 directed the Playhouse 90

Playhouse 90

Playhouse 90 is an American television anthology series that was telecast on CBS from 1956 to 1960 for a total of 133 episodes. It originated from CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California...

production, telecast live June 13, 1957 on CBS with Kim Stanley

Kim Stanley

Kim Stanley was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances....

 in the lead role of Mae D'Amato, E. G. Marshall

E. G. Marshall

E. G. Marshall was an American actor, best known for his television roles as the lawyer Lawrence Preston on The Defenders in the 1960s, and as neurosurgeon David Craig on The Bold Ones: The New Doctors in the 1970s...

 as Jerry D'Amato and Lloyd Bridges

Lloyd Bridges

Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr. was an American actor who starred in a number of television series and appeared in more than 150 feature films. Bridges is best known for his role of Mike Nelson in Sea Hunt, the most-popular syndicated American TV series in 1958...

 as Earl Pfeiffer. Also in the cast were John Bleifer and Edgar Stehli.

Current

Clash by Night is still performed today. John Mossman directed a revival in 2006 at Chicago's The Artistic Home that brought rave reviews, including Time Out:

The latest of Artistic Home's resurrections of great writers' assumed-dead works, Mossman's razor-sharp production slices open Odet's hard-boiled poem of the people. What's revealed is utterly devastating.

An earlier revival was by John McCormack's All Seasons Theater Group, a 1998 production with actress Jodie Markell. Peter Marks reviewed in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

:

Clash by Night is best known as a flaccid 1952 B movie, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Barbara Stanwyck, that chronicles Mae's anguish in her marriage to a simple, hard-working guy, and her subsequent affair with a complicated, drifting layabout. The filmmaker tried to inject some energy by transplanting the story to California (and, for some reason, the fishing industry) and tacking on a happy ending. (In the play, Mae's affair comes to a violent end; in the movie, she ends the affair and goes back to her bland but loving husband.) The revival, directed by Richard Caliban, returns the play to its more credible roots, Staten Island just before the American entry into World War II. Mr. Caliban understands that this is, more than anything else, a period piece, the period marking the growing power and prominence of the blue-collar class. The director immerses us in a specific time and place; the evening begins with a young couple performing, in reverse chronological order, the dance crazes and musical styles of the last half of the 20th century, until they arrive in the summer of 1941 on Mae and Jerry's suitably ramshackle porch, designed by George Xenos. Still, even with global war looming, Odets and Ms. Markell can make it seem as if the only significant problem in the world is Mae's paralyzing depression. Because some of the other actors are not playing at Ms. Markell's level, the focus on Mae's hollowed-out life is all the more intense. Some of the best moments in Clash by Night, in fact, occur as Ms. Markell stands on the porch, a remote figure commenting on the folly of her existence.

Titles

The Matthew Arnold poem has been a source for numerous titles, including Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

's The Armies of the Night and Clifford Irving

Clifford Irving

Clifford Michael Irving is an American author of novels and works of nonfiction, but best known for using forged handwritten letters to convince his publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive businessman Howard Hughes in the early 1970s...

's On a Darkling Plain. The 1964 British film, Clash by Night, carries an identical title, but it is a different story, not based on Odets play.

External links

• Clash by Night on the Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
  
  
• "Preserving television for future viewers" by Jake Ayres. Daily Bruin, May 30, 2007.