“‘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.' --Nicholas Ray
“The history of America is thus the model for the Western: the pattern of adventurers, outcasts and rebels looking for another chance. But Wind Across the Everglades has two claims on rarity as a Western. It 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 wild life, and Burl Ives the gang-leader king of the swamps, a ravager of wild life but also a symbol of lost fatherhood.
“This is one of Nicholas 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. The gang-leader may understand the wild world best, and the conservationist may be too innocent an idealist; but as they find one another, Ray creates a movie about father and son and about savagery and society in which there are no obvious answers. In the eccentric, picturesque membership of its ‘gang', this movie grasps the vitality of outcasts in the Western and prefigures The Wild Bunch. Implicitly, it addresses a profound attraction in the Western: the invitation to abandon rules and hypocrisy and live by night, in savage innocence, on dangerous ground.” David Thomson