Clash by Night

Mae Doyle returns to her hometown of Monterey, a fishing town on the California coast, after years spent chasing a different life elsewhere. Disappointed by what she found, she settles into her brother Joe's house and befriends Peggy, a young cannery worker who dreams of leaving the way Mae once did. Mae marries Jerry D'Amato, a kind-hearted fisherman, but she soon grows restless inside the modest life he offers and is drawn to Earl Pfeiffer, a friend of her husband with few scruples. The tension between what she wants and what she has settled for pulls the marriage toward crisis.

Fritz Lang directed the film, the twentieth of the twenty-four features he made in chronological order, following Rancho Notorious and preceding The Big Heat. Alfred Hayes wrote the screenplay, and the production came from RKO Radio Pictures with Wald/Krasna Productions. Barbara Stanwyck plays Mae, with Paul Douglas as Jerry, Robert Ryan as Earl and Marilyn Monroe as Peggy; Keith Andes and J. Carrol Naish are also credited among a cast of forty-three.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 6.7 from 137 votes, while critics gave it 7.2 from 17 reviews, a slightly warmer response than that of the wider audience. It runs 105 minutes and was released in the United States on May 30, 1952.