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.
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.