Clash by Night

Mae Doyle is a good-time girl, but now times are bad. Weary of too much booze and too many men, she returns to her girlhood home, the fishing village of Monterey, California. There she finds security as the wife of a devoted and dull fisherman and passion in the arms of his provocative best friend. Film noir master Fritz Lang (The Big Heat, Ministry of Fear ) directs four towering talents -- Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and rising star Marilyn Monroe -- in a stark tale of lives burnished by human emotion and shattered by human failings. Intense and powerfully realistic, Clash by Night (from a Clifford Odets play) is about many towns, many families. Serene on the surface. Roiling with desperation underneath.

• drama