Swamp Water - 1941

“Swamp Water” (1941) was what did it for Dana Andrews. After a few years in Hollywood bouncing between bit parts, an apprenticeship at the Pasadena Playhouse, and working as a gas station attendant, it took a trip to the Okefenokee to really launch his film career as a leading man.

This is part of the Dana Andrews Blogathon over at Classic Move Man, with links to other blogs posted this Saturday, July 28th.

Dana Andrews knew himself that ''Swamp Water" would be important to his career. In June 1941 he took “a fast cross country airliner,” to Waycross, Georgia to film on location according to the Waycross Journal-Herald of June 25, 1941. “‘It’s my big chance,’ laughed young Andrews a bit groggy after his first plane trip but fascinated by it all to such a degree he hadn’t been able to sleep.”

Thirty-three years later, in his mid-60s, in another phase of his career when performing dinner theatre in “Best of Friends” at the Alhambra Theatre, Jacksonville, Florida, Andrews took his wife on a side trip to the Okefenokee. He wanted to show her where he had filmed some scenes for “Swamp Water”. He was recognized in a Waycross diner. (Waycross Journal-Herald, February 13, 1974).

Dana Andrews had been the only principal actor to film in the Okefenokee, not counting his hound dog in the film, “Trouble.” According the Journal-Herald, Trouble also arrived on the same plane with Mr. Andrews, “‘sick as a dog’ from flying so high” in these days before jet planes with pressurized cabins.

Director Jean Renoir, in his first American film, and his assistant Irving Pinchel arrived as well, with Mr. Pinchel taking over the location shooting when Renoir went back to Hollywood, where of course most of the film was shot on sets.

It’s an unusual film, a precursor perhaps to Renoir’s “The Southerner” (1945) about Texas sharecroppers, which we’ll probably get around to sometime or other. In both, this esteemed French director, with an impressive body of work in French cinema behind him, and who was also the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, tackles a brooding American landscape. The swamp, with its gothic imagery, is a place of escape and freedom, but also a claustrophobic prison, a place of gruesome death.

Dana Andrews plays a backcountry youth who loses his hound dog, Trouble, in the Okefenokee swamp. He goes after him and meets Walter Brennan, who has been hiding in the swamp for five years, a fugitive from justice. Brennan had been wrongly accused of murdering a man, and he escaped before hanging.

His ragamuffin daughter, played by Anne Baxter, is taken in by storekeeper Russell Simpson as a hired girl. She is no-account by virtue of her father being no-account. She and Dana brave the community’s censure when he buys her a dress and takes her to the square dance.

Mr. Andrews has his own problems with run-ins with his domineering father, played by Walter Huston. There are a few subplots to round out this poor, isolated community -- Mary Howard plays Walter Huston’s young second wife, who is being romantically pursued by a smarmy John Carradine, who is given protection by the bullying brothers Ward Bond and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, who are actually the ones who committed the murder of which Walter Brennan is wrongly accused.

Did I mention there would be spoilers? No? Sorry.

It’s an interesting film both for Renoir’s perspective on American gothic, complete with the imagery of a skull atop a cross as a warning sign, and for it being Dana Andrews’ first leading role.

Andrews’s voice is what fascinates me most. He speaks his lines with his chin sunk into his chest, pushing the dialogue out of his body with a sound somewhere between growling and weeping. I know he was supposed to have a fine bass singing voice, but I never heard it. I can believe it listening to the fullness of his speech in this performance.

He doesn’t hunker down too much in a southern accent, though as a native southerner he could -- but that would make him stand out from everyone else in the community who do not speak with southern accents. Most especially the Massachusetts-bred Walter Brennan in his alligator skin clothing and his New England long vowels.

Andrews's emotions are raw and on the surface in this movie. In later roles he displayed that skillful knack of showing great depth of emotion under a surface of cool reserve, a man already burdened with too much baggage and afraid to acknowledge it. Here he conceals nothing. He is all joyful shout and angry bluster, yet it is not overacting. He is a young man of considerable pride who perhaps represents for Renoir the sunshine contrast to the dark swamp. His hair curling on his neck, his first bashful, then exuberant discovery of love for Anne Baxter, his physical energy in this film give us no foreshadowing of the haunted war vet, the gloomy private eye, the troubled police detective of future years.

Some of the scenes look straight out of a John Ford copybook -- the fiddle playing of “Red River Valley” at the square dance, and of course, the use of so many Ford regulars like Ward Bond, John Carradine and Russell Simpson.

Eugene Pallette is also along as the sheriff, whose otherwise jolly demeanor is a puzzle against the scene where he allows Ward Bond and “Big Boy” Williams to half drown Dana Andrews to force him to confess Walter Brennan’s whereabouts. It’s a bit of backcountry interrogation. Perhaps if he floats he will be declared a witch.

He and Walter Huston have a father-son reunion when Mr. Huston saves him.

Virginia Gilmore plays Mr. Andrews’s best girl, until she dumps him. Then her jealously over his attention to Anne Baxter drives her to accusing him of hiding the fugitive. She is smug, self-centered, manipulative, and dangerous.

The scenes at the dance are touching for the very way these folk observe courtly rules in contrast to their ragged best clothes and the rotting walls of the local meeting hall. I’ve been in swanky places where the manners were far worse.

They are proud people. It is pride that divides Dana Andrews from his Pa; pride that divides Walter Huston from his young wife, whom he thinks is seeing a man behind his back; pride which makes Dana shun his ratfink girlfriend; pride which makes him refuse to knuckle under Ward Bond. When his pal and surrogate father figure Walter Brennan accuses him of selling him out, it is his pride that makes Dana Andrews stand on purpose to take a bullet from Ward Bond to prove his innocence. More trial by ordeal.

And then back to gothic. There is a scene where “Big Boy” meets his demise in the swamp, slowly sucked up into a bog hole. It’s quite horrifying, and despite my fascination for bottomless pits in movies (see “Make Haste to Live” - 1954, here), I was amazed that the studio allowed Renoir’s fixed camera gaze on Williams screaming in terror as his disembodied head sinks into the mud. It’s something out of monster movie -- which would have been less terrifying because we do not believe in monsters -- than in a movie that has so far kept rigidly to unblinking reality.

Brennan lets a stunned Ward Bond live, to face the same hell he did as fugitive in the swamp. Their justice is crude, and final.

Another less horrifying, but cinematically striking scene is when John Carradine attempts to seduce Mary Howard, declaring his love for her while both are fairly tattooed with the mottled shadows of leaves that mask their expressions.

It’s an unusual film where character actors tell the tale. There are no stars, really, in this movie though certainly Walter Huston had a big name in film and theatre. The only star was the one yet to be -- Dana Andrews.

And Then There Were None - 1945

“And Then There Were None” (1945) is an almost perfect blend of solid direction, crisp black and white photography, and somewhat cheeky ensemble acting -- by mostly veteran character actors. It’s also a great example of how well Dame Agatha Christie’s novels translate to the screen.

We should note at the start, however, that this film adaptation is from the successful stage play, also written by Christie, and not an adaption of her novel, Ten Little Indians. The most glaring difference between the novel and the play/screenplay is what happens in the last few minutes. However, since this is a mystery, I won’t go into that.

It’s one of those movies where the atmosphere created is so much a part of the storytelling. We have the remote mansion on the isolated island, the constant bashing of the waves on the rocks, and curtains of sea spray flying before our eyes, and the sound of the wind behind the dialogue.

Except for Walter Huston, much of Hollywood’s English Colony was emptied to make this film. Part of its charm is the ensemble acting with no big stars to take leads.

The story, well known, is of ten visitors to this remote mansion at the request of its absent owner. Two are hired servants, played by delightfully adenoidal Richard Haydn, with Queenie Leonard as his wife.

The guests include Huston’s country doctor, a retired judge played by Barry Fitzgerald, a dissolute self-described “professional houseguest” played by the wonderful Mischa Auer (who, as in “My Man Godfrey” -- where he plays another professional houseguest, bangs a few strains of “Dark Eyes” or Ochi Chornya on the piano).

Judith Anderson is the sublimely puritanical Emily Brent, who wears her almost sinister self-superiority like a protective cloak. Roland Young is a bumbling detective, and C. Aubrey Smith as the forlorn but dignified retired general. June Duprez and Louis Hayward round out the cast as the hired secretary and the bold adventurer. They are younger, and prettier than everybody else.

On their first night together, they all dress for dinner (of course), where upon retiring to the parlor for bridge and cocktails, a spoken record on the gramophone accuses of them of various crimes. One has killed his wife’s lover. One has killed pedestrians by reckless driving, events from their past nobody knows but themselves. They are barraged with examples of the old nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians”, which begins:

Ten little Indian boys going out to dine,
One choked his little self and then there were nine.

During the evening, one of their party appears to choke, and dies. The camera pans back from the shocked guests in the parlor, back through the open double doors to the dining room where a china centerpiece of ten little Indians had earlier caught their attention. One of the Indian figurines has toppled over and broken.

Now there are nine.

And so this continues through the rest of the poem, one by one as a guest suffers a fatality based on a verse. Each time someone dies, another Indian figurine goes missing.

The action is a mixture of eerie and comic, but neither tension nor comedy are overt or over the top. It’s a smooth balance. A charming moment at the beginning when Mr. Huston and Mr. Fitzgerald, two aging professional men, share an adjoining bathroom and Huston helps Fitzgerald with his detachable starched collar and tie.

At one point later on, Huston describes his doctor’s work as mostly handholding to nervous patients and Fitzgerald teases him, “Don’t you believe in medicine, Doctor?” To which Huston replies, “Do you believe in justice, Judge?”

This becomes the paramount question. What is justice? Can we ever escape it? Who has the right to mete it out?

It becomes apparent that one of them is a murderer and all who die are being punished for crimes they’ve done but for which the law has not caught up with them. The doctor, for instance, lost a patient on the operating table. The doctor had been drunk when he attempted to perform the operation. Butler Richard Haydn and his wife were accused of bumping off a former elderly employer. All are here for their comeuppance.

They grow suspicious of one another, and afraid to be alone with only one other person in a room. A scene as funny as it is tense occurs when Huston and Fitzgerald, companionably enjoying a game of pool, suddenly find themselves alone in the room and panic, wielding their pool cues like defensive weapons.

The mystery -- not only who is the murderer, but who is next to die?

Director René Clair sets up some inventive shots, such as when one guest spies on another through a keyhole. The camera pans back, and we see that guest in turn being spied on through another keyhole.

I’d like to know where the location shooting was done, it’s spectacular.

Richard Haydn is comically pitiful as the beleaguered butler, who after his wife has been murdered, must still keep up with his duties, apologizing for serving cold meat for supper. When he is suspected of being the murderer, he drinks a little too much in resentment and sloppily serves or fails to serve from a silver platter. When he is told to open a door he has locked to accept a key, he replies testily, “Shove it!…under the door, Sir.”

I watched this movie recently after not having seen it since I was a child, and was amazed to discover how much I remembered, how vivid the images were to have stayed with me so many years. It’s a simple story, simply staged, but I think this is probably the best of all versions. Even the character parts that are smaller are neatly delineated so each actor has his moment to create in indelible image. We don’t know much about these people, and yet we know them very well.


Addendum:  Thanks to Casey at Noir Girl for asking where to see this movie.  I should have added this: it's currently on YouTube in it's entirety here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOXQX6OEd8M.

Abraham Lincoln - 1930

“Abraham Lincoln” (1930) plays out like fragmented memory, in this case the collective memory of a nation’s lore -- but with the unmistakable imprint of its director, D.W. Griffith. As is the case with most movies dealing with history, this film tells us as much or more about the era in which it was filmed rather than the era it depicts.


We celebrate Presidents Day with a look at a figure so wrapped up in folklore that his true nature, thoughts, accomplishments and legacy have been so long diminished in the bright glare of his legend. President Abraham Lincoln, and D. W. Griffith, both.

The movie is rich in folklore and is, like all of Mr. Griffith’s films, a huge project made even bigger by his reverence for the subject. In this case, his reverence is magnanimous considering his own father was a colonel in the Confederate army and Mr. Griffith grew up in an atmosphere of reverence for the Lost Cause. His family heritage and his Southern heritage influences his most famous, or infamous, film, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). Perhaps his film covering the life of Lincoln is an attempt to balance the scales in his tarnished reputation where racial stereotypes and promotion of the then Southern viewpoint are concerned. “Abraham Lincoln” certainly carries an impressive pedigree unique for films of that era -- first, the subject matter; second, the great director who influenced a generation of filmmakers and established the artistry of the flickers; and third, the writer of the screenplay.

This is Stephen Vincent Benet, the poet who only the year before, in 1929, won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem “John Brown’s Body”. Mr. Griffith was careful to add literary legitimacy to the movie, which was to be his first sound film.

Most interesting about “Abraham Lincoln” is not its subject matter or artistic cache, but that it is filmed like a silent movie. In view of this, it’s even more ironic that, due to scenes or sound tracks being missing, in the new restoration of this film, the opening scene has no sound. The restoration team added subtitles to give us the dialogue. There are a couple of other scenes in the movie where this also occurs. Therefore, when the film starts, we are on familiar ground with D.W. Griffith, settling into his usual brand of storytelling. When the restored sound finally begins some minutes into the film, it comes almost as a jolt.

As much of a jolt as the sound era was to prove to Mr. Griffith’s artistic sensibilities and his career.

Griffith added sound to his film, but seemed to do little else to adapt to the new era in filmmaking. His scenes are sketched out as historical vignettes, almost tableau at times. His actors, not allowing for the intimacy that sound movies would create between the actors and the audience, are still mouthing starch-stiff platitudes and over-emoting, at times veering into the old pantomime style. Griffith apparently did not discourage them from this because he knew no other way.

Walter Huston plays Abraham Lincoln, and for most part does quite well. He is a strong actor, looks like Lincoln, and is particularly impressive in showing how Lincoln ages through the years, in appearance and manner. At first we see him a robust frontier youth, “wrassling” in a tavern and courting Ann Rutledge (where his lip makeup could be toned down a little. Too much silent movie image here. Heck, too much Pola Negri here.), and through the years, his grief and his burdens age him prematurely. As, unfortunately, they do most Presidents.

Una Merkel has her first major role in films as Ann Rutledge. We’re used to seeing her as the wisecracking sidekick of the Great Depression, so this is an interesting turn for her in her brief scenes as Lincoln’s first love. Her death scene is melodramatic, but again, that is D. W. Griffith’s sensibilities at work here.  For more on Una Merkel's hometown tribute, have a look at this previous post.

Kay Hammond is good as Mary Todd, and Ian Keith plays a very over-the-top John Wilkes Booth, but anytime we see him on film he is over-the-top. He is always the frustrated actor-as-assassin.  Have a look here for John Derek as Booth in this previous post on "The Prince of Players".

Lincoln has his archetype, too. He is Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, the rail-splitter, the frontier lawyer who entertains his audience and exacerbates his opponents with homespun witticisms. Griffith makes a valiant attempt to cover pretty much all of his life, which may have been too much to bite off. We see that Mr. Griffith, typical of his generation and of that era, is of the school that history is the product of great men. His Lincoln is the old-time schoolroom copybook saint. Lincoln was not seen this way even in 1865 at the time of his murder. By 1909 we had a penny stamped with his likeness and grand temple of a monument, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1922, only eight years before this movie was made.

These days we are more apt to pay less attention to great men of history in favor of the average fellow, who may not have made history but certainly got in the way. Perhaps this makes us uneasy these days producing films about historic figures, to the point where so-called revisionist history endeavors to bury old folklore. Neither method of biography is perfect, but the pendulum swings back and forth in fashion, as it will.

D.W. Griffith was meticulous in his settings, his reenactment of the assassination in Ford’s Theater, just as he did with “The Birth of a Nation”, is as realistic as we know the event to be. This being a sound film, we also get to hear the lines from the play “Our American Cousin” that Lincoln was watching from his box. Remarkably, it lends an eeriness to the scene, another layer to the tragedy to come that could not be portrayed in a silent film.

This is not to say that all his historical facts in this movie are always right on the button; they’re not. They’re not too hard to pick out, either, so I won’t bother.

Although, I must say, the actors look the part. One of my favorite things about watching historical films is to see if the actors look like the real-life people they are portraying. This film does that pretty well, from General Ulysses S. Grant, to General Winfield Scott. General Robert E. Lee is close enough. I was surprised at Booth’s fellow conspirators -- one actor looks very much like George Atzerodt.

As regards Mr. Griffith’s expunging his reputation for using racial stereotypes, his success here is a mixed bag. The opening scenes, those silent ones mentioned earlier, take place on a slave ship where we see the misery of the slaves in chains below decks. They appear to be played by African-Americans in a realistic setting with a sympathetic message.

However, much later on in the film there is a scene where a group of white Southerners, John Wilkes Booth among them, gather to express their shock over John Brown’s capture of the Harper’s Ferry arsenal and his intended revolt. A single black man among them affirms that he wants no part of John Brown’s raid, and says he threw away the gun he was given. He is a “good” black. He is also a white man wearing blackface makeup.

Mr. Griffith was evidently not able to take one step forward without taking two steps back.

But, Abraham Lincoln fares well in his hands. He is given his due as a great man of history, and at his passing, the movie ends with a chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and then a very moving, if artificial-looking, camera pan across the woodland childhood home, the log cabin model, and then to another set designer’s model of the Lincoln Memorial. These are the bookends to his life, the log cabin and the classical shrine.

D. W. Griffith made only one more movie after this, a financial flop, and then he retired from filmmaking still only in his mid-fifties. Hollywood had finished with him. One can see why the great stories of ages past appealed to Mr. Griffith. They brought comfort to him, and do to many for whom the present is an even greater struggle.

What made Abraham Lincoln one of our greatest Presidents, I think, was his present-mindedness. He did not lean too heavily on the past as a crutch. Nor did he fear the future, except perhaps for the famous premonitions of his own tragic end.

“Abraham Lincoln” is now in the public domain. You can see the movie here in its entirety on YouTube.