‘Wind Across the Everglades’ Blows Hot and Cold

Against the backdrop of the Florida Everglades, two mighty opposing forces brawl in rude, knotted, clotted, quasi-homo-erotic bondage for the meaning of freedom. Whether such was the intent of Oscar-winning writer-producer Budd Schulberg, fresh from On the Waterfront, when he and his brother Stuart produced this lush dramatic quagmire on location, that’s what they ended up with by the time they fired director Nicholas Ray and strung together this compromised, lurid, fascinating mess.

Wind Across the Everglades is probably the first modern movie on the theme of the environment and the protection of ecosystems. Set at the turn of the 20th Century, a narrator bluntly announces that feathered fashions in ladies’ hats (the rapacious consumption of femininity!) has had a deleterious effect on wildfowl populations, with poachers hunting in defiance of new laws intended to preserve the Everglades.

Walt Murdock (Christopher Plummer) is a tall, strapping young hothead who gets jailed for assault (plucking a feather from the mayor’s wife’s hat) when he arrives at the train station to claim a teaching job. Now jobless, he’s recruited by the newly formed Audubon Society into the dangerous new job of game warden to put the kibosh on the activities of an all-male clan of outlaw “swamp rats” run by Cottonmouth (Burl Ives), a sensual Dionysian figure. If not caressing the snake in his pocket (!) or shooting at herons, he’s partaking of food or drink while exclaiming on “the sweet-tasting joys of this world!”

Can Murdock, who envies Cottonmouth’s manly freedom from civilization, persuade him that the only way to preserve his own wild lifestyle is to leave his fellow beasts alone? Or must one he-man take the other down? The film doesn’t make enough of it to be convincing, but a strange electric current runs between these men, as each sizes up and appreciates the other.

Part of the problem may be the lumpy narrative, which dwells on the swamp rat society with muddy, fetid abandon while much of Murdock’s story is plagued by narrative jumps, such as his sudden romance with a local gal (Chana Eden) whose Jewish origins were apparently part of the script at one point, according to the American Film Institute’s catalogue.

Another eccentricity is the pointless stunt casting in small roles of people known for other things: Gypsy Rose Lee looks the part of the local madam but has little to do besides strut through a couple of scenes. Pulitzer-winning novelist Mackinlay Kantor plays the judge, glimpsed briefly to no effect. Cottonmouth’s men include boxer Tony Galento mud-wrestling with jockey Sammy Renick while famous clown Emmett Kelly dances with himself. And there in the corner is an unheralded Peter Falk, squinting and barking in his feature debut.

This film, a failure by most reasonable assessments including the box office, offers a unique time, setting and theme, one that hasn’t dated even if the brawling robust tone has. The narrative is dotted with lovely nature and animal footage shot separately, and the Technicolor is still just gorgeous enough to make you wish somebody would spend money on a serious restoration. It’s now available on demand from Warner Archive.