In making his first American film, Jean Renoir eschewed the Twentieth Century Fox set being prepared for him and headed out instead for Georgia's desolate Okefenokee Swamp, the setting for this Dudley Nichols melodrama. Walter Brennan plays a suspected murderer hiding out in the trap-ridden swamplands, and Dana Andrews the young man convinced of Brennan's innocence. Interesting for the American “expressive technique” supposedly adopted by Renoir (for which his most ardent French supporters turned against him, and which made the film a success in America), the film is perhaps most notable yet least noticed for the way in which Renoir applied his particular genius to this American subject. Finally, it is admirable in its evocation of backwoods culture and landscape.

Godard was one Parisian who felt the French rejection of Swamp Water was unjustified. To those who lamented the late lost Rules Of The Game, he gave some (ironic) comfort: “Genius, Malraux wrote somewhere, is born like fire: of what it consumes. ...Swamp Water (is misunderstood) in its turn because it consumed The Rules Of The Game.... (Renoir) destroys even as one is still admiring the temerity of his structure.” (in Milne, “Godard on Godard”)