In April, 1974 I had the pleasure of working with Walter Brennan on a TV
commercial then spent the rest of the time in his den recording his memories
working in films.
The one question I regret having not asked is how they accomplished the scene
where Brennan kneels down and is bitten on his face by the snake. He must have had nerves of steel or they faked it somehow.
I havn't seen the movie in a hundred years and it still gives me the willies.
bkgraydon.
you worked with him?
that's awesomeWhen there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
Mr. Brennan was so very good in Swamp Water. He played that scene with the snake so coolly that I wasn't even sure he had been bitten at first.
sharehttp://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1338&dat=19520201&id=7uRXAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QfYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3720,333710
I found a temporary article here, where the mystery is solved. It was trick photography. But an amazingly good example of it.
Hey...I want to thank you for the info on the snake bite scene. Very interesting, especially for 1941, the fantastic job of
blending the two scenes together.
I finally found a DVD of the film (robertshardtofindvideos.com) and have watched the scene over and over again..
amazing!
Sorry it took a year and a half to respond, i forgot to check back.
biff.
[deleted]
I've never been keen on the inclusion of "grizzled old coots" such as Walter Brennan portrayed in later years, but here he really demonstrated superb acting skills. A surprisingly good film.
shareI know the feeling of "I coulda had a V8" i.e. wanting wishing to have asked about particular movies after the fact. I have done that with interviews and simply meeting actors and actresses at autograph shows. I'm still kicking myself for not asking Louise Fletcher about eating a frog in INVASION FROM MARS.
I am soon to do a writeup of SWAMP WATER in a two-month-long tribute to DANA ANDREWS. I think this movie is really good, and underrated in the Renoir canon.
I read that Len Maltin said Brennan was "outrageously miscast" and it irks me more than a little. When I saw this movie I felt that this was, for me, Walter's best work, and he had the savage prowess that this movie's co-star Walter Huston had in SIERRA MADRE.
That's cool to know about the snake-biting scene. I too was curious about how that was shot. If only Strother Martin was so lucky on the set of SSSSSSS!
Anyhow, check out my blog and you'll see many Dana Andrews posts and soon, a writeup double feature of SWAMP WATER and THE SOUTHERNERS.
All Movie Reviews www.cultfilmfreaks.com
Walter Brennan, I have found, is one of those actors, like Mickey Rooney, that people either love or hate (and for the record, I don't "hate" either of them!); but SWAMP WATER is one of Brennan's pictures I'd like for his "haters" to see.
More often than not, Brennan played characters that some find obnoxious or annoying; but here, Brennan is none of that and he acquits himself well in his top billed performance as the wrongly condemned fugitive from justice, ekeing out his existence for several long years apart from human society in the perilous swamplands, his sanity slightly unravelling under such austere circumstances.
I look forward to checking out your blog. :-)
This article is from 1952 so it most likely refers to the 1952 film Lure of the Wilderness,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044859/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt
a remake of Swamp Water, in which Walter Brennan is also bitten on the face by a cottonmouth.
But it looks like the same technique of combining two separate shots was used in Swamp Water.