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{{Italic title}}
[[Image:Kimstanleyclash.jpg|right|thumb|350px|[[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):
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==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.
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==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-white]] [[film noir]]/drama, ''[[Clash by Night]]'', starring [[Barbara Stanwyck]], [[Paul Douglas (actor)|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
==Television==
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==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.
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.
==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
==Footnotes==
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== External links ==
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20080905233431/http://www.dailybruin.com/news/2007/may/30/preserving_television_future_viewers/ "Preserving television for future viewers" by Jake Ayres. ''Daily Bruin'', May 30, 2007.]▼
▲*[http://dailybruin.com/news/2007/may/30/preserving_television_future_viewers/ "Preserving television for future viewers" by Jake Ayres. ''Daily Bruin'', May 30, 2007.]
{{Clifford Odets}}
[[Category:1941 plays]] ▼
[[Category:Broadway plays]]
[[Category:Plays by Clifford Odets]]
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[[Category:Films set in New York City]]
[[Category:Staten Island in fiction]]
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