The strangest and starkest of King Vidor's pre-Big Parade features is a lurid melodrama set in the Georgian swamps (and filmed in Florida). If The Jack-Knife Man was Southern lyricism, Wild Oranges is its flipside-Southern gothicism, and a foretaste of the heated Southern passion of Hallelujah (coming October 19). Its combination of brute action with atmospheric waterside melodrama is in the spirit of (though not in the league with) von Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters and Murnau's Sunrise. Based on a novel by the now-forgotten Joseph Hergesheimer (who in 1922 beat out Eugene O'Neill in the Literary Digest's critics' poll for the best new writer), the film cuts the world down to five characters. Two Northern men, anchored in a remote inlet, spot a nude woman swimming by. Soon they're enveloped in a bizarre Yankee/Redneck struggle with her grandfather, who cowers in a decaying mansion under a Civil War-induced "curse of fear," and with a certain cretinous "Nicholas-half man, half child." A formulation of Eric Bentley's might help sort this out: "Melodrama is the naturalism of dream life." The whole production does seem to have baffled Goldwyn's ad writers, whose unpromising tag was "Not One Massive Set! Not a Single Costume!" Instead, as often in Vidor, landscape is emotion. Scott Simmon