Swamp Water Blu-ray Review
Intruder in the Swamp.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 28, 2012
The Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system is often likened to a factory where product was churned out on a
weekly basis without much regard for content and similarly without too much worry about ultimate quality. The studios, which
in those days owned their own theaters and needed to keep those theaters "stocked" with new films on a weekly
basis, had their "production line" down pat, and the amazing thing is that despite turning out a huge number of films
every year, the quality (in terms of craftsmanship at least) was fairly uniformly consistent, a testament to the
hardworking men and women who populated the studio "working class" in those days. And while it certainly can't be
denied that there was a certain amount of populist pabulum fed to the masses by the studios in those days, there were
also an intriguing number of lesser known films that regularly pushed the envelope in one way or the other.
Case in point: 1941's odd
Swamp Water, ostensibly French master Jean Renoir's first American film, though it's
rather widely speculated that 20th Century Fox's Darryl Zanuck had producer Irving Pichel reshoot quite a bit of the
movie before it was released to a largely uncaring audience. But watching this peculiar, and in a strange way haunting,
film, one is immediately struck by a salient question: could anything like
Swamp Water get greenlit by
anyone, major studio or indie alike, in this era of cookie cutter plots and Syd Field-inspired screenplays? All of
the major studios who were cranking out at least a film a week in the thirties and forties had their own peculiar little
releases now and again, but
Swamp Water is certainly one of the
most peculiar of that era, a moody
Southern Gothic take on backwoods Georgia life that plays like
Green Acres as revisited by someone like Tim
Burton or even Douglas Sirk. Yes, that obviously sounds
weird, but
Swamp Water is a fantastic example
of what an unusual
auteur could do (even if his work was tinkered with at some stage in the production
process) within the confines of the old guard studio system.
The Art Film crowd is certainly well aware of Jean Renoir's inimitable contributions to world film, but for those whose
main background is American film, perhaps a brief introduction is in order. Renoir was the son of iconic painter Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, and Renoir
fils certainly inherited his father's impeccable visual sense, something that sets
almost all of his films apart from those of his contemporaries. Renoir's
oeuvre is long and legendary, but just
mentioning a very few of his most legendary films hopefully will suffice to give some indication of his rather inordinate
accomplishments. His 1932
Boudu Saved from Drowning was a fantastically literate look at class differences
placed within the confines of a semi-traditional farce (the film was remade decades later as Paul Mazursky's
Down
and Out in Beverly Hills). Renoir touched on class differences again in two of his most iconic films, the incredible war
set
The Grand Illusion (the first foreign language film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture),
and another film with war skittering about its edges,
The Rules of the Game, perhaps Renoir's most trenchant
examination of societal morés.
The Rules of the Game was met with rather disastrous response when it was
first released, and perhaps at least partially due to that calamity, Renoir withdrew somewhat to lick his wounds, ending
up in Hollywood (which also offered him safe refuge from the burgeoning conflicts of World War II).
Swamp Water takes place in and around the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, a setting Renoir aptly sets up in an
ominously foreboding opening shot featuring a cross pile driven down into the murky depths, atop which a skull hangs
precariously. The Okefenokee is a definite character in this piece, a menacing presence that is full of vicious crocodiles
and lunging cottonmouth snakes. Hunter Ben (Dana Andrews) loses his dog Trouble in the Swamp in an early scene,
and he decides to go back and find the poor hound, against the half joking, half serious advice of the townspeople
congregating at the General Store. There's a disturbing moment in this scene when two ruffians offer to drown some
unwanted kittens, and round the poor felines up in a burlap sack before leaving to do the dirty deed. One of the
kittens is momentarily spared by feral local girl Julie (Anne Baxter in one of the most unusual roles of her long career),
until she's instructed in no uncertain terms to hand the little critter over so that it can be killed. This is unusually brutal
and visceral filmmaking for that era, and it sets a troubling tone that is touched upon often times in various ways
throughout the rest of the film.
Once Ben ventures into the Swamp, he's soon accosted by fugitive Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan in one of his few top
billed roles), a man who insists he was wrongly accused of murder and who had escaped custody years previously and
has spent the intervening time hiding out in the labyrinthine nooks and crannies of the Okefenokee wilderness. Tom
and Ben forge an unlikely friendship (after a brief opening scuffle), something which deepens when Tom reveals to Ben
that Julie is actually Tom's daughter. That sets up the dual ends of the plot arc, which find Ben and Julie becoming
romantically involved while Ben uncovers information about Tom's wrongful conviction. Playing out within these ends
are a number of central subplots, one including Ben's father (Walter Huston) and his wife (Mary Howard), a woman who
doesn't seem especially displeased when a hapless local townsman (John Carradine) shows more than a passing
interest in her. There are also a couple of ne'er-do-well men (Ward Bond is one of them) who lurk around the edges of
the film and give it some added sinister content.
This is extremely moody filmmaking, more focused on character than big plot movements, and in a way the star of the
film is Peverell Marley's unbelievably sumptuous cinematography (IMDb lists Lucien Ballard as an additional uncredited
cinematographer). This is simply some of the most gorgeous black and white cinematography of its era, a lot of it done
on location in the Okefenokee Swamp. Light dapples on the characters and shadows spill across the frame in some of
the most beautiful
chiaroscuro lighting effects of the forties. This film presages the then nascent
noir
idiom, both in tone and look, if not in style or content. Brennan has come in for some critical brickbats for his work in
this film, but he's actually incredibly subdued and memorable in an extremely unusual role. Andrews was always
something of a cipher in his film career, but he's also unusually good in this film, as is Baxter, in a role that can only be
described as part
Johnny Belinda, part Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker.
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