Film Review
When Twentieth Century Fox offered Jean Renoir, recently installed in
Hollywood after his flight from war-torn Europe in February 1941, a
free choice of subject for his first American film no one was more
surprised than the studio executives that he should opt for a downbeat
regional drama, of the kind that John Ford specialised in. It is
hard to know precisely what attracted Renoir to Dudley Nichols'
adaptation of Vereen Bell's novel
Swamp
Water, a script which was conceivably written with Ford in mind,
but it struck a chord and the director made it his own. To this
quintessentially American tale of survival, redemption and generational
conflict, Renoir brings the stark realism of his earlier
Toni
(1935) and his compassion appreciation of the complexity of human
affairs which was so evident in
La Règle du jeu (1939).
Like many émigré film auteurs, Renoir had immense
difficult adjusting to the American way of making films. The
studio system offered little scope for experimentation and even less in
the way of tolerance for perfectionism. The challenge of working
within a budget and to fixed deadlines was one that almost overwhelmed
Renoir on this, his first Hollywood film. It was only when he had
complete independence (on
The Southerner) that he felt at
ease and was able to realise the kind of film he had envisaged making;
studio interference on most of his other American films often resulted
in a less than successful outcome and ultimately drove him back to
Europe. For
Swamp Water,
Renoir's insistence on shooting much of the film on location brought
him into immediate conflict with his bosses at Twentieth Century Fox,
and when the location shoot got out of hand producer Irving Pichel had
to take over to minimise the overspend. For Renoir, it was a
disappointing start to his American film career, even though the film
proved to be a commercial success, at least in the United States.
Swamp Water goes out of its
way to emphasise its American-ness, almost as if Renoir is ashamed, or
at least reluctant, to endow it with his Gallic signature. The
cast is predominately made up of actors belonging to John Ford's
familiar repertory - Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Carradine
and Russell Simpson - with Walter Huston occupying a prominent position
as the all-American patriarch. The mise-en-scène, lighting
and camerawork all lack the stylistic flourishes favoured by other
European émigré filmmakers, so the film has an ordinary,
understated, typically American feel which was interpreted by some
critics as a lack of inspiration and/or involvement with the
subject. Certainly, the film has none of the expressive lyricism
of John Ford's own regional dramas, and compared with Renoir's
subsequent
The Southerner
(1945), the most accomplished of his American films, it seems
positively self-effacing. Yet it is this deliberate unshowiness
which gives the film its charm and distinctive character, and also what
makes the central performances from Walter Brennan and comparative
newcomer (soon to become a major Hollywood star) Dana Andrews so real
and so memorable.
In Jean Renoir's oeuvre, water is an important and recurring motif, one
that usually evokes the continuity and ever-changing pattern of
life. Uncharacteristically, it has a far darker nature in
Swamp Water - forbidding and
treacherous, it instils fear in men, imprisoning or
destroying those who dare to venture into its unforgiving
currents. In our first glimpse of the titular stretch of water -
the Okefenokee Swamp in the southern US state of Georgia - we see a
human skull set atop a wooden crucifix, a stark warning of the dangers
it harbours and its murderous character. When it strikes, it does so
without mercy, and when, near the end of the film, it drags a man to
his death, the effect on the spectator is one of undiluted
horror. But the swamp also has a benign side - it offers a safe
refuge for a man who would otherwise have perished at the hands of his
own kind, and it provides a livelihood for an independently minded
young trapper that will improve the life chances of the fugitive's
abandoned daughter. The swamp may be cruel but it is neither
neutral or wilfully malicious. It has its own moral sense,
rewarding the virtuous as generously as it punishers sinners. It
is something fearful, yet it also a thing of beauty. Could this
possibly be a metaphor for the America that Renoir saw as he fell under
its enchantment in the early days of his exile?
Unlike Renoir's previous
Toni,
which was an experiment in pure realism,
Swamp Water is a realist drama with
clearly recognisable genre characteristics bolted onto it.
There are elements of western and film noir, the noir trappings
becoming evident towards the end of the film as the crime underpinning
the drama (a murder that took place years before the events depicted in
the film) is swiftly resolved. For the most part, these are
embellishments demanded by the conventions of the time and if they are
stripped away (along with the drawling Deep South accents) we have a
film that is pretty well transcendent of nation, culture and time, a
fairly universal portrait of human beings dealing with conflict and
personal need as best they can, within the rules that society sets for
itself.
The injustice of life is shown in scenes that are all the more shocking
for the manner-of-fact way in which they are presented to us - witness
the scene in which an unwanted litter of kittens is rounded and dumped
in a sack ready for drowning. The rift between the generations is
starkly illustrated by the inability of Ben to see eye-to-eye with his
father. The complexity of male-female relationships is poignantly
evident in Ben's fraught dealings with all of the women in the
film. What made Renoir such a great filmmaker was his genius for
observation, and
Swamp Water
constantly reminds of this through its array of richly drawn,
convincingly played characters. The mise-en-scène may
perhaps lack Renoir's personal imprint but such is the film's psychological realism
and concern for ordinary folk that we can hardly fail to recognise it as his own.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Jean Renoir film:
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Film Synopsis
Ben Ragan is a trapper who, along with his authoritarian father
Thursday, belongs to a small community living beside the feared
Okefenokee Swamp. No one who ever ventures into the alligator and
snake infested swamp ever returns, so when Ben sets out to look for his
missing dog Trouble he knows he is risking his life. Sure enough,
Ben loses his way and is relieved when he encounters another human form
in the terrible swamp. This turns out to be Tom Keefer, a fugitive from
justice who is wanted for murder. Mistrustful of others, Tom has
lived alone on an island in the swamp for years, and has no intention
of returning to the society of men. Having gained the old man's
confidence, Ben strikes up a business partnership with him, offering to
sell the skins of the racoons he hunts in the swamp and handing over
his share of the money to Julie, the daughter he has left behind.
When his former girlfriend Mabel turns her back on him, Ben begins
showing more of an interest in Julie, to the surprise of his
neighbours, who treat her like a pariah. The Dawson brothers are
none to pleased when Ben finds a witness who will swear that they
committed the murder for which Tom was blamed. As Ben heads back
to the swamp to tell Keefer the good news, the Dawsons follow to ensure
that neither man returns...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.