Wind Across the Everglades

On Inspiration and Neorealism

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 483; 19 April 1959.

It’s not because—in accordance with his sacrosanct habit of quitting a film on the eve of the last day of shooting when it’s not commensurate with his genius—Nicholas Ray abandoned the “set” of Wind Across the Everglades that it must be considered a lesser work. It’s not a masterpiece and it will figure perhaps at the eight position among the seventeen films of its auteur; but it’s nevertheless above the mean.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those ambitious films intended for an adventure movie market and, in this market, way too far from the norm. If he likes big subjects, Nicholas Ray nonetheless doesn’t consider the adventure movie a minor genre. For him, action, the behaviour of man in the natural world, teaches us everything about the individual and the universe. That was what was novel in Bigger than Life, where each psychological feature was expressed by the most violent of physical gestures.

Contrary to what we might think before seeing it, Wind Across the Everglades isn’t any Hollywood film. It’s an independent production put together by Budd Schulberg, writer of socially-oriented films like On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, who hates nothing more than Hollywood. But the story of this film demonstrates that he hasn’t understood what Ray sought beneath the neorealist principle of the film. For Ray, neorealism is a passkey to profundity while, for Schulberg, it’s neorealism for the sake of neorealism. Since Italians make good films in the street, it’s enough to copy them and sit with your arms folded.

Made on a small budget in the vicinity of a small village in the marshes of Everglades (Florida)—a wild, tropical Bresne—in entirely natural settings, with unknown, indigenous and amateur technicians and actors—it’s a jockey playing the ex-jockey, a boxer playing the ex-boxer, a famous writer playing the man of law—Wind Across the Everglades is first of all a documentary. Ray isn’t satisfied reusing footage from Warner Bros’ documentary stock. He films himself the shots of birds and reptiles which are among the most beautiful that cinema has given us. Beautiful in their violence, in their striking framing, in the poetic movement (which we find again in the scenes played by actors) by which the camera moves towards the animal, in the very manner that Ray directs these animals by making them overcome various obstacles. A Walt Disney crew already went to the region, but couldn’t give us as lively a document.

The subject? Like in all Nicholas Ray films, it’s violence. At the turn of last century, a young professor of natural science, now a guard at the Everglades natural reserve, seeks to stop the massacre of millions of birds that Cottonmouth, surrounded by outcasts, lunatics and convicts, hunts for pleasure in the depths of the marshes. The most surprising aspect is this portrait of beings on the margins of the society that interests Ray, who spent a part of his youth rummaging in the least civilized regions of the USA (even The Lusty Men and Hot Blood focus on bohemian lives and gypsies). But the portrait here is very cruel (cf. the jockey character). The struggle of the young man against violence is only of secondary interest. Ray has already dealt with that subject a number of times, and today he has dedicated himself to seeking the poetry of reality.

And so, the guard takes great pleasure in the lives of his worst enemies. Like in Bitter Victory, whose most subtle scene—the snake and the gunshot—we find reversed here, which also recalls the ending of Run for Cover, Wind Across the Everglades shows us the fever of men and the uniqueness of things. A very 1900s bath in the sea, a baroque pleasure house, an insane feast and a dying Burl Ives calling out to the crows: “Come and get me! Swamp-born, swamp-fattened!” The actors—Christopher Plummer, Chana Eden, Sammy Renick—are excellent since Nick Ray knows how to make them accomplish very natural gestures, which he accompanies with very short camera movements that give the impression of improvisation. In such a feverish life, the hero is always dishevelled, just like the film. The colour is average; the script, editing and music, very mediocre.

Will a more homogenous, more complete work, where the subject is just a pretext, emerge from this return to nature, whose beauties Nick Ray has naively sought to capture with the same love for life as a Griffith (Schulberg, though, hardly likes it)? That’s what happened with Renoir and Rossellini. Unfortunately, Ray is unemployed since a year thanks to a lack of clients.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]