Dark Waters sports one of the most arresting openings in cinema history. The familiar exposition trick of newspaper headline spinning before the camera brings news of a ship crammed with refugees travelling in the Caribbean sunk by a U-boat, with a photo of one of the few survivors, Leslie Calvin (Merle Oberon). The front page fades to a wispy superimposition, and behind it the photo comes to life, as Leslie sits up in her hospital bed. Like a character out of Greek drama, she recounts a nightmarish zone of experience with oracular force: “Did you ever go to a funeral where the minister forgot the service? Did you? When the man next to you died and they threw him overboard, and all you thought was, ‘There’ll be more water to drink,’ and didn’t even care that he was dead?” The mood of hysterical dread, tested sanity, and secret truth behind the façade of mere fact introduced here pervades the rest of Dark Waters, Andre DeToth’s third Hollywood film. Probably produced as a down-market imitation of the same year’s classier Gaslight, involving a similar plot of trying to drive a woman mad to gain her property, Dark Waters is far superior, thanks to DeToth’s direction and a script co-authored by Alfred Hitchcock’s regular Hollywood collaborator Joan Harrison. Leslie is a victim of an epoch, total war’s indifference to human collateral damage, left a shivering, baleful wreck on the point of crack-up. Having lost her oil magnate father and mother in the sinking, she recovers slowly in hospital, where a doctor (Alan Napier) encourages her to make contact with her only remaining relatives. She travels to bayou country, where her aunt and uncle own a sugar plantation. But things start going awry for Leslie immediately, as no-one arrives to pick her up from the train station, and she passes out on the platform in a spasm of worldly panic.
Local doctor George Grover (Franchot Tone) is called over to aid the stricken lady. Instantly smitten with the new arrival, he drives her out to the plantation, where she encounters her enthusiastic Aunt Emily (Fay Bainter), her distracted scientific author uncle Norbert (John Qualen), and their ensconced guest and friend Mr Sydney (Thomas Mitchell). There’s also the estate manager Cleeve (Elisha Cook Jnr), cook Florella (Nina Mae McKinney), and former foreman Pearson (Rex Ingram), who’s been banished from the estate for unknown reasons, but hovers close by at every opportunity, trying to parse the same mystery Leslie is gripped by. Leslie quickly starts to think she’s really going mad as she hears an eerie voice mysteriously echoing out of the tangled bayou trees, and sees the lights in her bedroom fade in and out. DeToth, smartly, doesn’t belabour the mechanics of this process much. He’s more interested in the slow, gentle tilt of the ordinary into the extraordinary, matched by the contrasting process of Leslie’s restoration as a functioning human, the ironic result of the attempts to unseat her mind. The moment of truth, when Pearson tells her he’s heard the strange voice calling to her too, results in Leslie marching back to the big house with new confidence. The film’s contemporaneous wartime setting inflects the drama with piquant details, from the demand for sugar fuelling the plot, as the plantation’s value is much greater than it would be before or after hostilities, to the theme of home front struggle. Leslie, an exile taking refuge in America, joins forces with Pearson, representative of a social bloc usually on the losing end of deals, in an attempt to unmask nefarious deeds. Soon it becomes clear Leslie’s real aunt and uncle have been murdered and replaced with accomplices of Sydney in the hope of making a very profitable sale of the plantation.
The first half of Dark Waters, apart from telling little betrayals of the darker game, plays as much like a Southern-locale take on Now, Voyager (1942) as it does a psychological thriller, depicting as it does a frayed woman’s efforts to heal and carving a niche for herself in a changing world where she can either be relic or adventurer. Like DeToth himself, Leslie is a recent transplant forced to orientate herself rapidly in a new land, finding both spectacles of grand communal vivacity and hidden boles of chilling violence and shame. Fittingly for a story that revolves around the tenuousness of human connection, DeToth delights in knitting a background texture that treats the setting and its inhabitants with indulgence, particularly in a lengthy scene at a local square dance where Leslie and George’s romance hardens into real ardour. DeToth’s camera roams around the scene, noting two urchins at large under the stages, and a clarinettist blazing out syncopation for a couple jitterbugging away from the main stage waltzers. Even the villains, from Bainter’s faux-Emily to Mitchell’s immaculately white-clad, politely dictatorial Count Fosco-wannabe and Cook’s gabby, pushy underling, are touched with aspects of comedy and pathos. Emily accidentally reveals her bogus status with her motor-mouthed assumption every biography sounds like another, whilst Cleeve constantly badgers Leslie for a date, to the point where you practically feel his blue-balled disquiet and fatigue in being outclassed by guys like George and manipulated by Sidney’s ilk—points of characterisation that eventually prove vital for the way the story plays out.
DeToth stages a particularly sharp scene of psychological torture as Sidney and Cleeve take Leslie to the movies, contriving to choose one that shows off captured war footage shot by U-boats of their marauding, causing Leslie to fold up in increasing discomfort and finally become distraught. It’s a moment that suggests DeToth was of a similar opinion to George Orwell’s suspicion, extrapolated in 1984, such footage was being offered in newsreels at the time to appeal to sadistic impulses in the audience rather than as mere education. Legacy and memory are battlegrounds in Dark Waters, where the steaming swampland, filled with dreamy beauty by floating flowers, cordons off the world Leslie is forced to share with false inheritors, whilst the titular waters hide a myriad of sins. Leslie’s recollections of her own mother are of a delicate, invalid lady, a state of physical being Leslie seems doomed to drift into psychologically, until a shock of falsified memory and perception brings her back around and arms her for an advance into a new future. McKinney, who had been the first African-American actress to ever gain a studio contract but was usually foiled by poor vehicles, doesn’t get much to do, but Ingram makes an impression as the stalwart Pearson, who refuses to abandon the property he regards as spiritually his. He becomes Leslie’s voice of sanity and reason, assuring her the destabilising campaign waged against her most certainly isn’t just in her head, but pays the price when he finishes up yet another corpse in the swamp mud.
The undercurrents presented in theme and setting connects Dark Waters with a host of films beyond its seeming inspiration. For one thing, plays as spiritual sequel to the same year’s Lifeboat (1944), with that film’s hapless playthings of war condensed in Leslie and returning to land only to find different struggles: Mr Sydney has something of the same breezy, confident superiority and manipulative skill as that film’s Nazi enemy. The duel between the twisted logic of the mansion and the hearty world beyond and the cynicism over the half-latent memory of slavery and colonialism echoes Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie(1943), whilst Jean Renoir’s initial American excursion Swamp Water (1942) and Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp (1946) likewise found in the southern swamp land a suitably primal landscape for New World mythology. But DeToth’s approach refuses the never-never approach of those, instead attempting to deal squarely with the landscape before him, 1944 edition, a land of people on the make whilst the rest of the world tears itself up and spits people like Leslie out. DeToth might well have helped give birth to the female-centric side of noir cinema that would continue through the likes of My Name is Julia Ross (1945), Secret Beyond the Door… (1948), and Outrage(1951), all stories that turn the familiar precepts of the more common noir pattern of hapless stooge man and femme fatale inside out, with their heroines threatened with entrapment, erased identities, and stolen voices.
DeToth famously lacked depth perception because he had lost an eye when young, and compensated by pushing the photographic lustre of his films towards heavy chiaroscuro and, in his colour films, a strong colour palette, to the point where sometimes the textures of his cinema seemed ready to bustle their way off the screen. Here DeToth’s framings throughout are a master class in storytelling economy and cinematic architecture, evinced in the subtly expressionistic, abstracting way he shoots Napier’s doctor hovering over Oberon’s bed and, later, the men crowding over her in the railway station, sculptures of looming, imminent masculine vigour and threat to a frightened and drained woman in spite of their best intentions. His talent for atmosphere is more overt in his evocations of the dense and miasmic zone around the plantation. DeToth would bring a similarly strong feel for characters stranded beyond recourse or struggling to maintain their sovereignty and match it to a careful, landscape-mapping camera study in the more raucous but equally well-orchestrated House of Wax (1953) and the gruelling noir of Crime Wave (1954). As the cage begins to form squarely around Leslie, the dancing, spatially-aware camera that was DeToth’s speciality comes into its own as he surveys the interiors and exteriors of the great house as Leslie, aware that the plot encompasses everyone around her but forced to maintain a show of obliviousness, tries to escape the eyes that glance out from parlours and down from balconies, and has to save her own life by making a quick charge to the telephone and outpace Cleeve in answering a call from George without giving the game away. DeToth builds to ingeniously simple moment when Leslie tries to slip from the house only to find herself caught at a shadowy corner between two smoking sentries.
Oberon’s performance is effective if mannered in places, her ever-exotic beauty hovering as hallucinatory as the environs about her but often perverted into an odalisque mask by fear and mental commotion, communicating Leslie’s struggles to keep an even keel without heading off into histrionics. Cook is at his finest as Cleeve, particularly in his drunken tirade and prideful boasting at a prostrate George, alternating a death’s-head grin of triumph and eager sensual greed with sickly self-disgust and fear. Mitchell is surprising as a smooth and gentlemanly villain, casually controlling his subjects with careful art, whether it be making gently phrased requests to break up the natural flow of conversation and leave people nervous, or offering helpful hints and reminders that pack the punch of gunpoint orders. Only Tone doesn’t quite fit, his hero well-written but stolidly purveyed, working just a little too well as the solid block of sanity anchoring the otherwise perfervid storyline. The script, by Harrison and Marion Cockrill, throws in some cunning twists that pay off in whiplash-inducing pivots of despair and hope for Leslie, as when George seems initially sceptical of her story about a murderous plot, only to leave her with a prescription that proves to be a note conveying his belief in her story but his caution in his certainty Sydney is listening to them.
This seems to promise imminent rescue for Leslie as George maintains a bluff in worrying about Leslie’s health with Sidney, only for DeToth to quickly reveal Sydney didn’t fall for it, as he has Cleeve knock out and tie up George whilst he arranges the last act of his plot to dispose of these final, pesky impediments to his plan. George insidiously inverts the mind games after the ghostly voice that called Leslie to self-annihilation is revealed as a gramophone and a trumpet: now the time comes to play on Cleeve’s drunken inadequacy and drive a wedge between the two criminals, with Sydney cast as the quasi-fascist manipulator of little men hoping for big things. His efforts pay off in a finale where the bad guys prove much more dangerous to each-other than to the couple they pursue through the murk of the bayou, whilst DeToth anticipates Cape Fear (1962) in turning the swamp into a nightmarish stage for survivalist sport, throwing up such images as Oberon and Tone’s head amidst bobbing water flowers, trying to resist becoming more faces in the drowned gallery, almost run down by a boat and skewered in the dark by a spotlight’s brimstone eye. DeToth’s noted streak of grim pessimism is presented in direct conflict with humanist impulse in the finale as Cleeve meets his terrified, wailing end in quicksand in spite of George’s attempts to help, held at bay by Sydney’s bullets. Evil consumes itself with awful efficiency and sudden empathy, and without his right hand the brains of the operation must surrender, exposed in his impotence. Dark Waters is still overshadowed by similar films of the era, but it’s definitely one that should be much better known.
