Revisiting and expanding on my review from early this year:
I am a big fan of
Swamp Water. On the surface it is Southern Gothic melodrama that could have leaped off the pages of William Faulkner. Scratch a little deeper and, like the worlds of Faulkner, there is a swirl of themes regarding primitivism, the natural world, man's capacity for evil, and internal conflicts of the heart, all gathered up in the hands of master director Jean Renoir. This was my first Renoir film, a blind buy when it was released by TT, and spurred me to seek out other Renoir works on blu-ray. The remarkable elements in the film include the portrayal of the forbidding and dangerous swamp, as much alive and a driving force in the drama as the main characters themselves.
For those who have not seen
Swamp Water, the cross and skull pictured on the Blu-ray cover art is a navigation marker used by the locals to warn them that going past that point deeper into the swamp meant you stood very little chance of finding your way back out. It also serves as an effective metaphor for character transformations in the film. The story centers around a community scratching out a living on the edge of a large inscrutable swamp, a dark "other" in the lives of its inhabitants, and of one individual who dares to venture past the warning marker into the depths in search of his missing dog. What he encounters there changes his life.
Starring one of my favorite classic actors, Dana Andrews,
Swamp Water features memorable performances, rich atmospheric cinematography, a well written script, and a keen outsider's eye from Renoir that respectfully records the social structures of a simple backwoods people. Filling the screen with subtle allegory and metaphors that connect the film to his earlier humanistic observations of European society, including the importance of hunting as a binding tie between village families, Renoir shows us that the swamp folk share universal bonds with the world at large. To casually dismiss them for their primitive condition relative to modern 1940s society is to turn the mirror of ignorance back on ourselves. This was Renoir's first film made in the U.S. after relocating from his native France, which was then under German occupation. At a time when the rest of the world was tearing itself apart, the life portrayed in
Swamp Water seems the most profoundly intelligent choice of all.
The cinematography on this one is simply gorgeous, with amazing depth of field that pulls the viewer into the watery labyrinths of the Okefenokee Swamp, where exteriors were filmed. You can practically smell the decaying plant life and hear the buzz of the mosquitoes, all in gloriously moody black and white. The Blu-ray PQ is stunning.
Swamp Water falls into that early wave of lost-in-the-vault titles released by Twilight Time that led me to take a closer look at their output and love what I was finding. Following closely on their previous release of
Rapture, in bringing us
Swamp Water TT pulled another lovely but forgotten rabbit out of the Hollywood hat, one that deserves to be rediscovered for the fine film it is.
NOTE: all images above were taken from the internet. The picture quality on this one is superb, like you could walk right into the picture and enter a black and white world.
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