SWAMP WATER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 183, 24 December 1942, Page 17

SWAMP WATER

(20th Century-Fox)

| TKE The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road, and Of Mice and Men, this is a story about people right outside the com-

mon round of experience-the backwoods folk of Georgia who dwell alongside the Okefenokee Swamp, 700 miles of practically unexplored watery wilderness, infested by alligators and the poisonous cotton-mouth snake. A nice place for a melodrama, and the producer has given it to us here with all the trimmings. I feel, though, that a less floridly decorative treatment would have been preferable, and I’m told that the original novel by Vereen Bell was very much a work in pastel shades. Not content, however, to let the swamp spread its own sufficient miasma of mystery and horror over the story, the producer has covered it with such a thick pall of melodrama that not many of the characters emerge as human beings. You do get a few glimpses of reality-the blonde charmer who is, in her way, as. treacherous as’ the waterways of Okefenokee and as deadly as the cotton-mouth; the village storekeeper; and one or two others. But these are incidental characters, on the fringe of the fog. To give them their due, the central players are very capable melodramactors. With different handling they might have done better, but what they are called on to do here they do with a will and with considerable technical skill: Walter Brennan as the hermit of the swamp, a man in hiding because ofa murder he did not commit; Walter Huston as a stern, jealous, but well-intentioned Old Testament type, with a much younger wife and a rebellious son; Dana Andrews as the son who braves the terrors of the swamp ‘and clears the hermit’s name; John Carradine as a snake-in-the-swamp-grass; and Anne Baxter as the Cinderella of the story. Swamp Water is not a pretty picture, for it is not about a pretty place or pretty people. Some may even call it sordid or morbid, but that would not be’ to its detriment if it’ were good art, as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men were. Swamp Water is not in the same quality street as those two pictures, but since it is an interesting and unusual melodrama I have no qualms about giving it a handclap (seated).