Clash by Night is a ‘love triangle’ story shot mostly on location in the heart of what used to be an active fishing industry in Monterey, California—John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
Physicality is this movie’s meat and potatoes. It’s summertime, but that’s not the only reason the atmosphere of this working class town is sultry. There are bare-chested young men and older bears in wife beaters, Barbara Stanwyck looks great in a slip, and Marilyn Monroe looks terrific in everything.
A world-weary Mae Doyle (Stanwyck) returns home after ten years seeking her fortune on the road. It doesn’t take her long to decide to settle down with Jerry D’Amato (Paul Douglas), a reliable fishing boat captain who sees only the good in people. Mae and Jerry marry and have a child, but Jerry’s best friend Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan), a cynical ladies’ man, pique’s Mae’s memory of the pleasures of a former faster life she feels that she begins to miss in the routine of being a wife and mother. 
Though directed by Fritz Lang, a key influence on the noir genre, this black and white A-movie is not, strictly speaking, film noir: the femme has an edge but is not fatale, and there are no guns and criminality. Rather, it is a romantic melodrama set within the context and rules of the orderly daylight world and the conventions of the time.
Lang said that he got to Monterey a week before the actors did and filmed a lot of local fishing and cannery activity: the first five minutes show the town in a documentary style with its ambient sounds, placing the main characters at work among others in the midst of Monterey’s commercial activity: a sea captain, a roustabout, a cannery worker. 
The story opens with Mae ‘coming home’. She carries a large single suitcase away from a railway siding with a train pulling slowly away, walking through town to Angelo’s, the local watering hole, where she first meets Jerry. Then she walks back across the tracks to her childhood home, where her brother Joe (Keith Andes) lives with his girl friend Peggy (Monroe).
Lang tells the story mostly in choreographed long takes that give his frames depth and emphasize his characters’ physicality and body language, particularly the dynamic between different characters and among groups of characters. Mae dances one way with Jerry, half clothed because she is safe; and though she may dig under Earl’s wife beater, she never appears less than fully clothed with him. The physicality in long shots also serves Monroe well. She is luminous, she speaks with her body, not really acting so much as dancing through her scenes. It is clear that she has an intensely physical relationship with Joe, which Lang shows us this in a short, sweet scene with Peggy and Joe walking home together from work. Peggy also picks up on Earl’s cruel streak, which both excites and repels her.
In one of many remarkable scenes, Mae is in the back yard of her childhood home standing amid five horizontal lines of laundry in the lower half of the frame, hanging clothes out to dry. Peggy pops out the back door on the upper right side of the frame in a long skirt that Mae has loaned her, skips girlishly down the back steps and twirls across the yard in top half of the frame as Mae looks on, a bit amused, maybe a little jealous, but more likely as surprised as the viewer—and, in a sense, awakened to the next act. 
Also of note is Jerry’s eccentric Uncle Vince (former Vaudevillian and character actor J. Carrol Naish), an alcoholic Iago who precipitates the denouement by stirring the gentle Jerry to action.
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