Swamp Water

Film Details

Cast

Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter

Technical Details

After four months of ducking unsuitable scripts and being thwarted in his bid to develop pet projects, Jean Renoir finally showed an interest in Dudley Nichols's adapt... more >

After four months of ducking unsuitable scripts and being thwarted in his bid to develop pet projects, Jean Renoir finally showed an interest in Dudley Nichols's adaptation of a Saturday Evening Post story by Vereen Bell. Delighted to have found his expensive exile some gainful employment, Twentieth Century-Fox supremo Darryl F. Zanuck shunted Fritz Lang off the picture and offered Renoir the pick of the studio's acting talent. But while he was fortunate in securing the services of Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter (and Walter Huston and Walter Brennan as their respective fathers), Renoir found the remainder of the assignment deeply frustrating.
Allowed only two weeks location shooting in Georgia, Renoir and cinematographer Lucied Ballard nevertheless captured some richly authentic imagery. But Zanuck mostly confined their footage to back projection which only emphasised the artificiality of Richard Day's Okefenokee sets. Nichols's dialogue was also clumsily folksy, but Renoir's poor English prevented him from noticing. Zanuck didn't care, but he did object to his director treating the picture as an artistic exercise and Renoir had long given up trying to impart any personality on proceedings before Zanuck locked him out of the editing suite.
Yet, despite its troubled production, Swamp Water still boasts a fine ensemble cast, some touching moments and a surprisingly evocative sense of place that recalled Nichols's Americana collaborations with John Ford. Indeed, it's tempting to suggest that, had Renoir been able to make this involving story of a trapper proving the innocence of a wrongly jailed neighbour in his own way, then he might have produced a minor classic along the lines of Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948). < less

View all 87 of David Parkinson’s reviews