Timeout London  Make the most of your city   The Woman on the
Beach   Film noir  Not yet rated  Be the first...   Time Out
says  The last film from Renoir's wartime exile in America,
considered too obscure, too erotic, and cut by nearly a third of
its running time by RKO after a preview. What might have been is
anybody's guess (not least because it freely rewrites the
emphases of its source novel, Mitchell Wilson's None So Blind),
but what's left is great Renoir: a tormented triangle involving
a blind painter (Bickford), his passionate wife (Bennett), and a
shell-shocked sailor (Ryan), all three of them outcasts in
different ways. A film noir in mood, with terrific performances,
wonderful use made of the dead-end settings (the lonely clifftop
house, the beach strewn with dead hulks), and darkly elemental
overtones to the emotional battle (Ryan's recurring nightmare of
drowning; Bickford's cleansing by fire of his past). Fragments,
maybe, but remarkable all the same.   Add +  Release details  UK
release:    71