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Waste of time

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

As much as I admire Renoir, I don't think he had found his Hollywood sea legs yet in this intriguing misfire of a film. The strange thing to me, is this had all of the elements of one of the more psychologically intense Hitchcock films--wounded hero, masochistic relationships, lurking menace, even a flock of sea birds--but it comes off as half formed and coded in a cipher that eluded me.Some of it is clearly preposterous. Did the Coast Guard really have a cavalry? If so, shouldn't they be riding seahorses? Why so much screen time for the local bumpkins? And yet, there is something uncanny about the picture. A film noir that puts aside gats, bad girls, and goniffs that did well in the war, and goes for a dreamy haze of shadowed unease. That, and a glimpse into bohemian lifestyles before they went mass market.I do not agree with other reviewers about Bickford's performance. Hammier than a Hormel packing plant in my book. Robert Ryan plays the Robert Ryan we have come to find deeply alarming. Joan Bennett has to tell us that she's bad, which is not a fault in her stars, but in the script.71 minutes hints at butchery in the editing room. I could say I'd like to have seen what they threw away, but really regret that the picture seem to lack the budget for a competent script rewrite.

You'd think that a film starring Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford would be far better. For one thing, Bickford, already in 1947, looked far too old to play Bennett's blinded painter husband. Ryan is a coast guard officer who falls for Bennett and at the same time suspects that Bickford is feigning his blindness. That would have been a great premise to stick to, but it didn't and the picture may have suffered as a result.Ryan allows Bickford to fall off a rock and the two battle on a raft during a ferocious storm. Amazingly, there are no fatalities, which in itself is ridiculous.When I saw the ending, I thought that they would be bringing in Mrs. Danvers from "Rebecca," and even that scene ended in what many might view as a cop out.

The leading actor-actress of the film were Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan. However, Charles Bickford (Tod) had a tremendous performance as a former painter, blind, with a sixth sense highly developed. The director Jean Renoir tried to combine human feelings with thriller in this film based on the novel "None so blind" of Mitchell Wilson. From the very beginning it was not difficult to guess what Peggy (Joan Bennett), Tod's wife, and the navy's lieutenant Scott wanted. Peggy was ambitious, she loved and hated Tod at the same time, while Scott was looking for the real love of his life. The relationship of Peggy with Scott looked opportunistic rather than due to sentimental attraction. Tod was bound to Peggy, but why? this is probably what the film wanted to demonstrate, once one breaks what is shared with your partner you will be free as Tod finally became. The film looks to be incoherent initially, e.g. Scott often had nightmares, and they never had any real connection with the main plot of the film.

I agree with the reviewer who found Charles Bickford's performance as the blind painter as the most compelling and best done. But then, Tod, the artist, is the only one of the three main characters who motivations and personality are clear. His much younger, beautiful wife, played by attractive brunette Joan Bennett, is held captive by him in an emotionally and physically abusive way. At the same time, she finds herself powerless to leave him, though she finds the psychologically injured Navy vet Robert Ryan, who dreams of walking underwater toward a beautiful sea nymph who resembles her, very attractive.Ryan's character is the biggest puzzle. We can perhaps understand the young wife's clinging to her aging, blind husband out of guilt. After all, it was she who apparently severed his optic nerve during a drunken argument some time ago, though how she managed this without a scalpel is unclear. There are no marks on the painter's face, leaving one to wonder if the cause of blindness is not psychological, or indeed metaphorical. But Ryan's murderous stupidity when he twice comes close to killing the blind painter are only pardonable under the assumption that Ryan is so stress inflicted from his war experiences that he is innocent of even a murder attempt. I didn't buy it, and nor do I see how the movie's conclusion begins to resolve Ryan's obvious mental issues.