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the audience applauded

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Merle Oberon and her parents manage to escape by ship from the Dutch East Indies just before the islands are captured by the Japanese. They reach Madagascar but are denied visas. The ship is torpedoed and Oberon's parents are lost. She herself winds up in a lifeboat, all of whose passenger except four die of thirst. She's finally rescued and finds herself in Louisiana where she seeks refuge at a sugar plantation owned by an uncle and aunt she's never met. You can see she's been through a lot already.She's pretty shaky and her family at the plantation welcome her but they don't help much with Oberon's torment. "How does it feel to almost die at sea?", they ask. And, "Tell us all about how horrified you were when your parents drowned." The overseer joins right in. Oberon hears strange sounds at night. Her bedroom lamp seems to go on and off by itself. Someone is calling her name in a strange voice.Fortunately, she's met a doctor, Franchot Tone, from the town and he's a nice reliable sort who is attracted to Merle Oberson, as any normal man would be, what with her striking felinity and air of helplessness. After he visits her at the plantation a few times he asks her to marry him but she -- thinking she's going mad -- turns him down.At that point, I thought I heard a strange voice calling my name. My lights seemed to flicker on and off. A handsome young doctor proposes to a woman and she tells him to bugger off with no explanation. Yes, I must be going mad.But, no! Sane after all. The doctor returns, discovers the reason for his having been turned away, comes to believe that she's in jeopardy, and manages to save those startling and frightened cat eyes from a watery grave.Merle Oberon is pulchritudinous, no doubt about it. She's not a powerful actress, though, and neither is Franchot Tone, whose most engaging feature is his slightly theatrical but reassuring baritone, grown a little deeper with age.If you haven't guessed, that welcoming family at the plantation isn't the real family at all. The originals have been murdered and a phony aunt and uncle, Fay Bainter and John Qualen, have taken their places. The idea is to pose as the owners, sell the plantation, and abscond with the loot. Oberon's arrival mixes everything up.The mastermind behind this treachery is Thomas Mitchell, pretending to be a friend of Oberon's family. You can tell at once that something is up with Mitchell because when he greets Oberon at the plantation, he's TOO receptive. In fact, the guy overacts the slimy villain throughout. It's not Mitchell's kind of role. Mitchell is the friendly adviser or the unflappable doctor. This is a role for Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre or even Bela Lugosi. If Mitchell HAS to be a heavy, he's got to be somewhat seedy and make funny wisecracks as he did in "Secret of the Incas." He can't go parading around in immaculate white suits complaining that the servants have prepared fried chicken again for dinner.The secondary villain is perennial schmuck Elisha Cook, Jr. He has things other than money on his mind. When not prompting Oberon to dredge up those horrible memories, he's following her around and making lewd proposals in that phony hollow voice of his. "You and me could have a good time if you just let yourself go." He deserves to die in a pool of quicksand.The direction is by studio pro Andre De Toth and he does a good job. One very neat shot from a high angle shows Oberon in a pure white dress on the balcony, hesitating before trying to escape, and in another room on the ground floor sits Mitchell, wreathed in smoke, blocking her escape. The photography is by John Mescall and Archie Stout and effectively evokes the swamps and bayous, even in the absence of any location shooting.It's a rather heavy melodramatic mystery, resembling "Gaslight" before the Big Reveal, which comes about two-thirds of the way through. It's not without interest.

It seems too good for Merle Oberon in Dark Waters. Being one of four survivors from a ship that left Japanese occupied Dutch East Indies in a perilous voyage that took her parents, she's alone in the world. But her doctor, Alan Napier, in New Orleans where she was taken finds she has relatives in New York. But miracle of miracles they are in residence in an old family plantation in the bayou country not far from the Big Easy. She makes arrangements to go there and sends a telegram.Merle's odyssey then takes a strange turn when no one is there to meet her at the station. She eventually gets to the plantation where uncle John Qualen and aunt Fay Bainter are pleasant enough as is another bachelor uncle, Thomas Mitchell. There's an overseer in Elisha Cook, Jr. who fancies himself a lady's man, but he hasn't got a prayer when Merle sets her sights on local doctor Franchot Tone. But a lot starts to make her more and more uncomfortable in these family surroundings.This independent film released by United Artists veers right down the middle between Gothic horror and noir. The trappings are pretty cheap, the players are fine in their roles. As it turns out nearly all of them are cast against type, especially Mitchell. He's in a role that you'd expect Sydney Greenstreet to be doing, but Mitchell does fine with it in fact being cast against type probably works for him in terms of realism.Franchot Tone was free from MGM and now doing roles he'd never be cast in with that Tiffany studio. He's out of dinner jacket and light comedy and gets a chance to show what he could do even in a part that's not the center of the film. Dark Waters is very much a Merle Oberon film.The film really could have been a classic with a director like Alfred Hitchcock instead of Andre DeToth. It's not bad though, an interesting tale where a lot of the familiar players aren't doing their usual stuff.

I first saw this film when I was about 12 years old and it scared the living daylights out of me. I saw it again recently on a nice DVD with a print from the UCLA archives and enjoyed it once more with less of the initial reaction of a 12 year old.There are a number of elements in this productions favour.The setting of the swamps and the remote plantation provide generous doses of eeriness for starters.Oberon, whose star was on the decline, is perfect with her very British genteelness and performance of a woman in a vulnerable state. We are given indicators (such as the her discarded telegram) early on, that all is not well - she thinks she in going deeper into madness. She pulls this off very well.I am a huge fan of the orchestral scoring during this period, however the lack of it here, and instead lots of sounds of the swamps, adds generously to the suspense, in addition to a number of nighttime shots.The directors montage at the start of the film is a perfect and dramatic beginning to one of the sleeper suspense films of the period.

Leslie Calvin is the sole survivor of a submarine sinking and, having seen other survivors die before they could be saved, her mental health has suffered and it is only the help of Dr George Grover that sees her making progress. To aid her recovery she heads out to see her relatives on their plantation but is bothered when nobody is there to collect her. Arriving at the home she meets her aunt, uncle and extended family for the first time and tries to settle in. However a series of mental triggers set Leslie's recovery back and it almost seems that her family are deliberately being insensitive.With very few votes on this site, I decided to watch this film on the basis that very few people have seen it. Unsure of the plot I braced myself for a bland melodrama when the film opened with a hysterical Leslie but I was pleasantly surprised when the film became something much darker and more interesting. I can't go into more detail without spoiling it for you, but the plot sees a group of people trying to drive Leslie deeper into her madness; on this level it maybe doesn't work quite as well as it should have done because the plot does have holes in it but these are not that much of an issue because it does manage to do a lot of other things well enough to cover the gaps and carry the film.The first of these is the atmosphere, created by lighting, cinematography and direction. It is as close as a real swamp and has a genuine air of tension and creepiness to it throughout. The material is a lot darker than I had expected and, once the real hearts of the characters are revealed I was quite taken by the quite moral void they seemed to inhabit. Of course without the actors this wouldn't work as well as it did but a mix of good performances and clever casting means it was pretty good. Oberon is excellent in the lead role and is convincing in the way in which she seems unsure of her own sanity while also being genuinely afraid of things around her (or herself?). Beside her Tone is far too bland and is much of a muchness but does meet the requirements on him well enough. Mitchell is a great bit of casting; much more famous for warmer, comic roles, he seems to relish the character and does well for the majority before excelling at the end. Cook Jr is as good as he often can be and plays "naïve/unhinged sidekick" pretty well. The rest of the cast are all strong enough but for me the film is worth seeing for the from Oberon and Mitchell.Overall this is a very enjoyable little film that trades a lot on its atmosphere and main performances. The story is interesting even if it does have basic holes in it and dealing with logic problems by just ignoring them but for the reasons above I think this is well worth a wet weekend's viewing.