This is a bleak vision of a typical Barbara Stanwyck role, the worldly wise woman trying to make a go of domesticity. Defeated by the city, she returns to her small fishing town and attempts to subsume her sophistication in marriage to fisherman Paul Douglas. But she is drawn into the adulterous net of Robert Ryan, like her, an anguished misfit. The film, adapted from a play by Clifford Odets, has one of the most caustic scripts of any of the fifties noirs. Visually, Lang and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca juxtapose claustrophobic interiors and documentary style location shooting (so uncharacteristic of Lang) of the Monterey fishing industry and Cannery Row, making this an effective counterpart to another, similarly incisive film about postwar women as homeless refugees, Rossellini's Stromboli. Marilyn Monroe, in one of her first important dramatic roles, takes lessons from sister-in-law Stanwyck on how to be free and then come home "when you run out of places."