Round Up 1946, Part Two: Strangler Of The Swamp

In the wake of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Frank Wysbar left Nazi Germany with his 'non-Aryan' wife Eva. Changing the spelling of his name to Wisbar, he would find success in American television production in the 50s, but prior to that he did his time in the PRC trenches. His Strangler Of The Swamp has been classed, with the works of fellow PRC plugger Edgar Ulmer, as a model of the kind of rabbit a very good director can pull out of even the shabbiest of filmic hats. It is a penuriously cheap remake of his last film completed in Germany prior to emigrating, Faehrmann Maria (aka Ferryboat Woman Maria and Death and the Maiden), which the Aurum Horror Film Encyclopedia compares favourably to Murnau's Nosferatu and Dreyer's Vampyr, and calls his greatest achievement. Like Val Lewton, Wisbar knew better than to try to stretch a budget any further than it could comfortably reach, and the entirety of Strangler was shot on one studio set: a stretch of river, the ferry landing, spectral trees, and lots and lots of dry ice fog for the characters to appear out of and disappear into. Rosemary LaPlance takes over as ferryman when her grandfather dies, and encounters the specter of an even earlier ferryman who, hanged for a murder he didn't commit, has come back from the dead to return the favour to the descendants of his accusers, one of whom Rosemary is unfortunate enough to fall in love with. A modest, atmospheric chamber piece, that succeeds solely on the verve of its director, this is exactly the kind of little-movie-that-can that I love to get wind of. And it's actually available on DVD. Nice.