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Renoir (Swamp Water) and Buñuel (Robinson Crusoe) go in, Roeg (Walkabout) and Herzog (Aguirre) come out. "The feather craze," fledgling cities are built around such fads, thus Miami ca. 1900. Birds are slaughtered to adorn hats, the newly arrived teacher (Christopher Plummer) is immediately at odds with the community after plucking the decorative plumage from a passing matron. A conservationist between two stools, "progress and I never got along very well," his counterpart is the poaching kingpin nicknamed after a most venomous snake (Burl Ives). (Formidably stout and red-whiskered like a Flemish Blackbeard, the outlaw materializes upside-down in front of the newcomer's viewfinder.) Opponents who might be equals in the Eden that might be Hell, one's need to protect "the balance of Nature" is answered by the other's primitivist philosophy, "eat or be et." An ecological tract by Budd Schulberg expanded into a folkloric poem by Nicholas Ray, quite the heady swig of Technicolor moonshine. Dances are rigidly regulated on the civilized side while in the wilderness anarchic outcasts enjoy muddy quadrilles, as endangered a species as the egrets they shoot. "Play me a nice, sad song about kissin' and killin'." Fourth of July is a Seurat river with a bandstand for necking under, the Everglades accommodates pet reptiles and lethal trees, images veering from lustrous to grainy. (The heterogeneity of forms is reflected in a supporting cast of respectable strippers, old pugilists, indigenous activists and clowns out of greasepaint.) The superb centerpiece pits Bird Boy against Cottonmouth in a drinking bout where values and moods blur in a howling gale, such are "the sweet-tastin' joys" of Ray's pantheism. Wild fowl fill the screen at the close, and the following year there's Rossellini's India. With Gypsy Rose Lee, George Voskovec, Peter Falk, Howard I. Smith, Tony Galento, Pat Henning, Emmett Kelly, Chana Eden, Curt Conway, Fred Grossinger, Sammy Renick, MacKinlay Kantor, and Cory Osceola.
--- Fernando F. Croce |