“All the people were refugees from their original environment, trying to find, and some had found, security by plundering their environment. Some were trying to find their security by eliminating others from their environment,” Ray said. The history of America is thus the model for the Western: the pattern of adventurers, outcasts, and rebels looking for another chance....Wind Across the Everglades is set in Florida, and the feathers of exotic birds are its ‘gold,' stolen for the hats of high society and even for the allure of striptease. Christopher Plummer plays an Audubon Society man trying to protect wildlife, and Burl Ives the gang-leader king of the swamps, a ravager of wildlife but also a symbol of lost fatherhood. This is one of Ray's most vibrant pictures; built around the ambiguity of beauty and danger, it sees complex truths of human nature within the story of exploited natural resources....Ray creates a movie about father and son and about savagery and society…(and) addresses a profound attraction in the Western: the invitation to abandon rules and hypocrisy and live by night, in savage innocence, on dangerous ground.