Actor-singer Hugo Del Carril revealed himself to be a strong director with Troubled Waters, "the last of the great rural social problem films" (Tim Barnard, Argentine Cinema); like its celebrated prototype Prisoners of the Land (Mario Soffici, 1939), its polemics and class divisions had international repercussions. Set among the tea plantations where workers subjected to a brutal regime cling desperately to vestiges of humanity, the film "has a slow, compulsive narrative in which the strong images speak more eloquently than the dialogue" (John King, NFT). Troubled Waters was based on a novel by Argentine communist Alfredo Varela, who was in Perón's prison at the time the film was made; in order to obtain permission to shoot the film, notes Barnard, Del Carril not only eliminated Varela's name from the credits but wrote the novel's communist characters out of the film version.