Last updated Kim Stanley as Mae D'Amato in the June 13, 1957 Playhouse 90 production of Clifford Odets' Clash by Night, directed by John Frankenheimer. She returned to Playhouse 90 three years later (March 7, 1960) to portray Sarah Eubanks in Horton Foote's adaptation of William Faulkner's Tomorrow, directed by Robert Mulligan.
Clash by Night is a romantic triangle drama by Clifford Odets which premiered on Broadway in 1941 and was later adapted to film and television. The title derives from Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (1867):
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, debuted on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. Directed by Lee Strasberg, the production opened December 27, 1941 and ran for a total of 49 performances before closing on February 7, 1942.
Tallulah Bankhead and Lee J. Cobb headed the cast as Mae and Jerry Wilenski with Katherine Locke as Peggy Coffey and Joseph Schildkraut as Earl Pfeiffer. Boris Aronson designed the setting of the Wilenski home on Staten Island in the summer of 1941. While Robert Ryan was acting in a 1941 summer stock production of A Kiss for Cinderella with actress Luise Rainer, 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, and the character names were altered from Wilenski to D'Amato. Fritz Lang directed the 1952 black-and-whitefilm noir/drama, Clash by Night, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Marilyn Monroe 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). Others in the cast included Silvio Minciotti as Papa D'Amato and J. Carrol Naish as Uncle Vince.
Television
Five years after the movie, the Odets play was adapted for television. John Frankenheimer directed the Playhouse 90 production, telecast live June 13, 1957 on CBS with Kim Stanley in the lead role of Mae D'Amato, E. G. Marshall as Jerry D'Amato and Lloyd Bridges 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.[1]
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:
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.[2]
Titles
The Matthew Arnold poem has been a source for numerous titles, including Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Clifford Irving'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.[3]
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, model, and dancer. A stage, film and television star, she was known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional for her strong, realistic screen presence. A favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra, she made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
The year 1941 in film involved some significant events.
Sorry, Wrong Number is a 1948 American thriller film noir directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster. It tells the story of a woman who overhears a murder plot. The film was adapted by Lucille Fletcher from her 1943 radio play. Stanwyck was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. In the mid-1930s he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash. From January 1935 Odets' socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Night in the 1941–'42 season, Odets focused his energies primarily on film projects, remaining in Hollywood for the next seven years. He returned to New York in 1948 for five and a half years, during which time he produced three more Broadway plays, only one of which was a success. His prominence was eventually eclipsed by Miller, Tennessee Williams, and in the early- to mid-1950s, by William Inge.
The Group Theatre was a theater collective based in New York City and formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in— a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique", derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; a reference to the company as "our group" led them to "accept the inevitable and call their company The Group Theatre."
Alan Hale Sr. was an American film actor and director, best remembered for his many character roles, in particular as a frequent sidekick of Errol Flynn, as well as films supporting Lon Chaney, Wallace Beery, Douglas Fairbanks, James Cagney, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan, among dozens of others.
Jerome Irving Wald was an American screenwriter and a producer of films and radio programs.
Joseph Schildkraut was an Austrian-American actor. He won an Oscar for his performance as Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the film The Life of Emile Zola (1937), later he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as Otto Frank in the film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and a Primetime Emmy for his performance as Rabbi Gottlieb in a 1962 episode of the television series Sam Benedict.
Robert Bushnell Ryan was an American actor who most often portrayed hardened cops and ruthless villains. He worked in theater and films. Ryan acted for over three decades and received one nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Crossfire (1947).
Paul Douglas Fleischer was an American actor.
Clash by Night is a 1952 American film noir drama directed by Fritz Lang and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe and Keith Andes. The movie was based on the play by Clifford Odets, adapted by writer Alfred Hayes. This was the first major film in which Monroe was credited before the movie's title, albeit with fourth billing.
The Big Knife is a 1955 film noir directed and produced by Robert Aldrich from a screenplay by James Poe based on the 1949 play by Clifford Odets. The film stars Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase, and Everett Sloane.
Norman Krasna was an American screenwriter, playwright, producer, and film director. He is best known for penning screwball comedies which centered on a case of mistaken identity. Krasna also directed three films during a forty-year career in Hollywood. He garnered four Academy Award screenwriting nominations, winning once for 1943's Princess O'Rourke, a film he also directed.
Charles J. Winninger was an American stage and film actor, most often cast in comedies or musicals.
Love Letters is a play by A. R. Gurney that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play centers on two characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Using the epistolary form sometimes found in novels, they sit side by side at tables and read the notes, letters and cards – in which over nearly 50 years, they discuss their hopes and ambitions, dreams and disappointments, victories and defeats – that have passed between them throughout their separated lives.
Rafaela Ottiano was an Italian-American stage and film actress.
Ladies of Leisure is a 1930 American pre-Code romantic drama film directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ralph Graves. The screenplay by Jo Swerling is based on the 1924 play Ladies of the Evening by Milton Herbert Gropper, which ran for 159 performances on Broadway.
"I Hear a Rhapsody" is a 1941 pop song that became a jazz standard, composed by George Fragos, Jack Baker and Dick Gasparre. In 1941 it was a top 10 hit for three separate artists, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Dorsey and Dinah Shore. “I Hear a Rhapsody” was at the top of "Your Hit Parade" in 1941. It was featured in the 1952 film noir Clash by Night, in which it was sung by Tony Martin. The sound track featured jazz notables such as pianist Gerald Wiggins, alto saxophonist Benny Carter, and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. The film, directed by Fritz Lang, involved a love triangle in a small fishing village and starred Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, and Paul Douglas.
Night Music is a 1940 play by Clifford Odets. Written in 1939 and produced by the Group Theatre, the play was a commercial failure, closing after 20 performances.
Easter is an independent film based on the play by the same name by Will Scheffer. It is directed by Richard Caliban who also wrote the screenplay with Will Scheffer, and stars Jodie Markell, Barry Del Sherman, Sean Runnette, and Max Wright in his final film role before his death in June 2019.
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