Swamp Water (1941)
Directed by Jean Renoir, Irving Pichel

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.

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...