The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean Renoir took it away and cut out 30 minutes of it. After reshooting all the scenes between leads Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, he recast the only other significant woman in it. Out went Virginia Huston and in came Nan Leslie, who plays the significantly named Eve.
The result? “I produced a film which was, I think, neither one thing nor another,” Renoir later said. He never made another film in the USA. Instead he went back to France to lick his wounds. The original film is lost to time, which is a pity, because from what can be picked out of what’s left, it must have been a tasty if rather mad melodrama.
This version of it is still pretty weird and flavoursome. Ryan plays an affable sailor with PTSD who is about to marry the love of his life, boilersuited Eve (Leslie). Out riding his horse one day, he meets “the woman on the beach”, a bohemian called Peggy who lives nearby with her husband, older blind artist Tod. And that’s that. Scott instantly falls for Peggy (Bennett) and she for him, in what Renoir intended initially to be an exploration of pure sexual attraction.
For “blind” read “impotent”. Tod is played by the craggily handsome Charles Bickford. Clearly older than either Peggy or Scott, the question mark hanging over Tod’s virility is expressed instead as Scott’s doubts about Tod’s blindness. He’s convinced Tod can still get it up – sorry, find his way about – and is thus a threat. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Scott leads Tod to a cliff edge to see what Tod will do when real danger threatens.
A relationship cannot recover from a breach of trust like this, you’d have thought. And yet the two men patch something back together, though what looked like Tod’s plan to loop Scott in as an officially sanctioned third leg of a ménàge à trois, Tod’s man on the job, is no more.
Beneath this blunt-force plot, symbolism abounds. Eve’s masculine job, Scott’s horse, the wreck of a ship where Scott and Peggy meet, as well as Tod’s blindness and state of almost permanent fury, plus Scott’s feverish PTSD dreams in which he drowns and Eve appears at the bottom of the sea to comfort him.
Freud is down there too. If Scott is eros, the love drive, then Tod (which means death in German) is thanatos, the death drive. “I assure you a blind painter’s just the same as a dead man,” Tod tells Scott at one point, just one of many reference to the death he’s already experienced or the one to come.
The word “oneiric” is invariably trotted out to describe this, yes, dreamlike, exploration of the psyche, but it is a movie set in the realm of the unconscious first and foremost. Or, put another way, it’s a mad sexual psychodrama aimed at anyone who’s done Psychoanalysis 101.
Against these odd, you cannot expect subtle performances. Character development jumps about 13 steps – probably on account of the missing half an hour – and in any case character seems to come second to symbolic value. Everyone stands for something. No one is a real character. Ryan is probably miscast, or uncomfortable, though he keeps his end up, so to speak. Bennett, at 37, is the perfect stage of ripeness for Peggy – “So beautiful outside. So rotten inside,” as her husband describes her. Leslie plays Eve as if she were in the garden of Eden – which in a sense she is – the potential perfect wife.
In her boilersuit, at her lathe, Eve represents something more tangible as well – the woman who has stepped up in wartime – while Scott also functions as a cultural metaphor, the damaged male back from combat. Neither of these stories really get a chance to take a lungful of dramatic air. Maybe they belong to the original treatment, maybe they’re part of the unwieldy rehash. It’s uncertain, but it’s partly the messiness of The Woman on the Beach that makes it so fascinating.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
