The Woman on the Beach

The Woman on the Beach is a 1947 film noir directed by Jean Renoir, released by RKO Radio Pictures, and starring Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford.

Scott Robert Ryan, a mounted Coast Guard officer, suffers from recurring nightmares involving a maritime tragedy. He sees himself immersed in an eerie landscape surrounded by a shipwreck and walking over skeletons at the bottom of the sea while a ghostly blond woman beckons him from afar. He thinks he is going mad. But at the same time, he decides to propose to Eve Nan Leslie, a young woman working at Geddes, a local shipyard catering to the Coast Guard. She accepts. Eve has a strong resemblance to the ghostly blond of his nightmares.While riding by the seaside on his horse, Scott meets Peggy Joan Bennett, a brunette, the mysterious wife of Tod Charles Bickford, a blind painter. At first, though, he rides by her as she stands near a shipwreck protruding from the sand she seems like an eerie echo from his nightmares. After a conversation, they discover that they share similar metaphysical anxieties. A bond develops between the two but the situation gets more tangled when Tod tries to befriend Scott. Tods attitude toward Scott, apart from his friendship, is also ambivalent. The retired painter tries to test Peggy and Scott to gauge how far they could go in their relationship. Outwardly Tod seems confident he even tells Peggy that he knows she could never leave him and that he finds Scott, a much younger man, virile but banal. ........

Source: Wikipedia