Swamp Water (1941)

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1. 

   K.

   An unjustly neglected gem from Renoir, easily one of his greatest films.
   
   Jean-Luc Godard - "The second American Renoir to be shown after the Liberation. There begins the misunderstanding : a misunderstanding which was to turn the most admired of French film-makers into the most maltreated. The crowning paradox is that it was Renoir's warmest partisans who resolutely threw the first stone : a stone thrown earlier at La Regie du leu which, after five years of upheaval in the world, is still barely accepted, let alone understood.
   Swamp Water can also boast of having revolutionized Hollywood in the long term. For the first time a big studio agreed to the idea - very reasonable, after all - of not shooting exteriors in interiors. Swamp Water follows the same principle as Toni, with twenty years of experience behind it. This is no longer a question of being willing to take risks, but the audacity of absolute assurance.
   Booed at the Biarritz when it was first shown in Paris, Swamp Water is one of the seven or eight major turning-points in Renoir's career. The disconcerting thing is that this is not the start of a new turn, but its end. And everyone knows that when coming out of a bend, the champion presses down hard on the accelerator so as to set off again at top speed. Which is what Renoir does on an aesthetic plane.
   Genius, Malraux wrote somewhere, is born like fire. Of what it consumes. If La Regie du leu was misunderstood at the time, it is because it consumed, destroyed, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. And Swamp Water in its tum because it consumed A Regie du leu. In the same way, Elena will be dismissed by those who praise French-Cancan. Mistakenly, because Renoir demonstrates constantly that the only way not to be late is always to be early. So he destroys, even as one is still admiring the temerity of his structure." 3 months 2 weeks ago
2. 

   nbats

   https://youtu.be/o8lPf9xfA4w 3 years 2 months ago
3. 

   Siskoid

   Renoir's first American film has what I find to be a frequent hallmark of name-directors suddenly not working in their native language - not having an ear for English. Swamp Water, a Southern Gothic tale where Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp is translated as a kind existential purgatory benefits from the director's sensibilities, but the dialog, especially as delivered by cod Southerners, is almost unbearable. I'm sure the novel is also to blame, making all these rural characters speak with bad grammar and hickspolitation clichés, but it doesn't sound right from the obvious non-Southerners in the cast. Dana Andrews is especially bad, even beyond the dialect. It's like he's play-acting reactions here. Anne Baxter is better, but does anyone believe she's so feral as to be "ugly"? Walter Huston, as the swamp hermit whose story acts as a linchpin, is the real star here. Regardless, at least it's shot in Okefenokee and the pervasive sense of injustice and violence there is strong. It doesn't escape the melodrama of the novel, but it moves along at a good pace, has villains to hate, and heroes to root for. I'm just not sure how "Renoir" it is. One of those Hollywood compromises. 1 year 7 months ago

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