[From Luc Moullet’s Fritz Lang (1963/70, Seghers). See Table of Contents]

Critique of Our Times

Clash by Night (1951) is an adaptation of a play by Clifford Odets. Lang is certainly at ease in modern New York theatre which wallows in the spectacle of human degradation. But where the New Yorkers ascribe degradation to a kind of undefined Ananke, clumsily associated with the social constitution of America, and mostly explicable by the playwrights’ resentments, Lang insists on the notion of responsibility. Fate, represented once more by the movement of waves, becomes one with the realist document, the presentation of port life, boats and fishermen in the credits sequence.

This time around, the characters are bestowed with a certain psychological depth, which rules out implausibility. After ten years of tumultuous life, Mae comes back home to lead a more orderly existence; she marries Jerry, a brutish and unsophisticated fisherman older than her, whom she leaves for one of his friends; but she returns to her house for her child. Jerry is full of good will, but can’t understand a woman who has lived in other milieus. In contrast, Earl the lover is rather abject; with Jerry refusing to hand over the child to the adulterous couple, and Mae refusing to leave without the child, he splits without confronting Jerry. Earl is a violent lunatic.

It’s one of the rare occasions in Lang’s work where secondary characters have their own existence, which can be explained by the faithfulness to the original play. There’s the completely senile grandfather, tormented by the image of an abandoned baby girl, the infirm and alcoholic uncle, and especially the typical young American couple: Marilyn Monroe plays a worker who knows perfectly what she wants, where she’s going and whom she wants to marry. The man she has chosen, Keith Andes, is passive, listless; he lets himself be led around by the nose. It’s a microscopic study of American society, run by women, just as they dominated the fake Übermenschen of the German period.

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