The Woman on the Beach is a 1947 American film noir[2] directed by Jean Renoir and starring Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, and Charles Bickford.

The film is a love triangle drama about Scott, a conflicted U.S. Coast Guard officer (Ryan), and his pursuit of Peggy, a married woman (Bennett).

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 blonde woman beckons him from afar.

He proposes to Eve Geddes, a young woman working at a local shipyard catering to the Coast Guard.

Scott sets up an outing to test Tod; he lures him near the edge of a cliff, thinking that he will be forced to see and therefore avoid falling.

RKO Pictures offered Joan Bennett the starring role in 1946, hoping to capitalize on her recent success with the films noir The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street.

Whereas he had balanced his business acumen with an appreciation for the artistry of movie making, the new executives were baffled by Renoir's film.

A consumer preview was held, attended by high school and college students who were uninterested in the movie's dark themes.

After the catastrophic preview, Renoir spent the next six months reediting the film, even reshooting several sections, causing him much distress.

[4] The staff at Variety liked the film and wrote, "Thesping is uniformly excellent with the cast from top to bottom responding to Renoir's controlling need for a surcharged atmosphere.

"[5] In 1992, Leonard Maltin was less complimentary, calling the film an "overheated melodrama" and noting it was "easy to see why this was Renoir's American swan song.