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The skeleton from La Règle du jeu is at once seen, its head adorns a moss-covered makeshift cross in a murky bog, Jean Renoir's first view of America. A hamlet by the Okefenokee Swamp, Plath's "great tap root" and no mistake. The trapper (Dana Andrews) ventures into it searching for his pooch and finds the grizzled fugitive (Walter Brennan), a suspicious hermit who keels over from snake bite but is back on his feet by morning, to the surprise of the visitor who's got a grave and a prayer ready. "Looks like I worked all night for nothing." The pelts from their partnership are sold at the general store where the old man's daughter (Anne Baxter) toils, "kinda raggedy" is a chivalrous description for the quasi-feral maiden first seen lolling on the floor with kittens. Not Fordian myth for these rustics but a commune of equal parts fondness and poison, in other words Georgian cousins to the laborers of Toni and the slum-dwellers of The Lower Depths. "Like another world in here, innit?" The protagonist's father (Walter Huston) allows himself a fleeting smile of relief before turning a stern front to the missing scion, his stepmother (Mary Howard) has trouble keeping away an amorous troubadour (John Carradine). (The interloper's tell-tale guitar figures in a marvelous bit of composition: Carradine hides in a barn cellar and is alerted by off-screen strumming, the camera pulls back as Andrews enters through the door below and a wooden beam splits the screen horizontally.) Wilderness forges unlikely bonds, it also engulfs Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and leaves Ward Bond to wander dazedly. "Not a bit of solid ground to stand on," Renoir the poet of flux wouldn't want it any other way. Flaherty's Louisiana Story is a friend's riposte. With Virginia Gilmore, Eugene Pallette, Russell Simpson, Joe Sawyer, Paul E. Burns, and Mae Marsh. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |