DARK WATERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 333, 9 November 1945, Page 18

DARK WATERS

(United Artists)

T is apparently becoming popular with film producers to drive heroines mad by subtle suggestion rather than by open violence. Having seen this done not

many weeks ago to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight-and done rather better? tooI was perhaps not as excited as I should have been by the fate prepared for Merle Oberon in Dark Waters. She, poor girl, is the sole survivor of a lifeboat voyage after her ship has been torpedoed, and enters the picture with a first-class nervous breakdown which does not, however, prevent her from describing her experience in such curiously stilted phrases as "Constantly there was the delirious nightmare of the open boat. .. ." For a rest-cure she goes to stay with an uncle and aunt she has never seen (John Qualen, Fay Bainter) on a sugar-planta-tion among the bayous of Louisiana, where it soon becomes apparent to the (contiriued on next page)

(continued from previous page) audience, though not immediately to her, that everybody is doing his or her best to drive her quite mad. Everybody, that is, except the local doctor (Franchot Tone) who, by taking her for motor-drives and paying her amorous compliments, tries during the daytime to counteract the effect of creaking doors, mysterious interruptions to the lighting system, and weird voices calling her name from the swamp which disturb her at night. Amid the mental torment to which she is thus subjected, it is a relief to the girl to discover that all these scarey goings-on are not the hallucinations of a disordered mind, but are the outcome of a deliberate plot; that her uncle and aunt are not her uncle ang aunt; that the smooth-tongued visitor (Thomas Mitchell) who seems to run the place, has already committed three murders and is not averse from a few more; and that the overseer (Elisha Cook, jr.) is quite as unpleasant a specimen as he looks, It is still a relief even though it means that, having failed to dispose of her by psychological methods, the gang will have to use a more direct approach and"that her friend the doctor is threatened by the same watery end as she is, Though it never gets much beyond the just-average class, Dark Waters has some passages which suggest that, if handled with more imagination and finesse, it could have been a high-grade thriller. The scene where things go bump in the night and voices call from the swamp; the scene where the heroine catches her "aunt" out in a verbal slip and realises

that though her sanity is not in danger | her life is; even the scene where the wicked overseer disappears, gurgling horribly, beneath the quicksands-these are moments of good quality melodrama. But the film does not take full advantage of its opportunities, particularly its atmospheric opportunities. Much more could have been done to heighten and make realistic the tension in the story, as well as in the heroine’s mind, by paying greater attention to the settings and especially to the humid, oppressive atmosphere of the swamp-lands. The acting is similarly uneven. I have seen Thomas Mitchell more happily cast, but when it comes to buying a theatre seat, he can have my money any time he likes. Since I saw him as the orgiastic drummer boy of Phantom Lady I count Elisha Cook, jr., among my favourite exponents of screen nastiness» Fay Bainter is also rather effective, masquerading as a silly woman. But Franchot Tone is rather too suggestive of a sheep in wolf’s clothing when he starts making polite passes at the heroine the moment he meets her, and is not much more convincing when he turns the tables on the villains in the final sequence. As for Merle Oberon, her mental agony, upon which almost the whole story depends, seldom goes much deeper than her make-up.