Product Description

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Mono ), Spanish ( Mono ), Spanish ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Filmographies, Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: The Woman on the Beach is a 1947 film noir directed by Jean Renoir. It is a drama about a conflicted U.S. Coast Guard officer played by Robert Ryan and his pursuit of the wife of a blind artist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104187 in DVD
• Formats: Import, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 68 minutes

Features

• THIS DVD WILL NOT WORK ON STANDARD US DVD PLAYER

Customer Reviews

Not Renoir at his best but definitely ahead of its time
The Woman On the Beach isn't top drawer Jean Renoir, but his near-noir psychodrama has much to recommend it despite the inevitable tinkering at the hands of RKO. There's some striking imagery and design (not least the shipwreck on the beach where the illicit lovers meet) and Robert Ryan gives a strong performance as the vulnerable lead despite having the odd line of inane on the nose dialogue like "Let's face it, I'm not well!" - but then, this IS a character haunted by nightmares of romantic liaisons at the bottom of the sea amid the skeletons of his drowned shipmates. And that's before he gets reluctantly drawn into Joan Bennett and her blind artist husband Charles Bickford's marital problems. Not that Ryan, falling for Bennett despite the fact that her vocal delivery often turns into a deadening drone, believes Bickford's blind, and it's not long before trying to prove it by taking him for a walk along the edge of a cliff...

It's hard not to see this as a major influence on Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, so perverse is the couple's relationship of mutual dependency and loathing, although at heart it's about the need to burn the ghosts of the past, whether it be driftwood from a sunken ship or something more personally damaging. The ending is either brilliant or disappointing, and you probably still won't know which after seeing the film.