Buster thinking “Hey, toots, I went to Olympics, too.”

SWAMP FIRE, as in “there is a fire in the swamp”, not “the swamp is on fire”, although now that we’ve wrecked the climate the latter can’t be completely ruled out. In the instance of the 1946 B-movie with that surefire stampede-the-box office title it refers to a piece of Louisiana bayou set ablaze (never mind the water) by local trapper/lout ‘Mike Kalovich’ (Buster Crabbe with a mustache and Russian! name & accent—never mind the Creole populace) who is ticked at rich developers & jealous of ‘Johnny Duval’ (Johnny Weissmuller, named Johnny in the script maybe to help him remember his cues) whom Mike hates because they both liked the same home-swamp gal (Carol Thurston, supposed to be ‘fiery’ because she’s a brunette Cajun named ‘Toni Rousseau’) and because Johnny has a fancier job and has also been making marsh moves with ‘Janet Hilton'(foxy Virginia Grey) a snotty outsider, big city sophisticated yet somehow hot to do the horizontal zydeco with a barely communicative local (that would be war-haunted Johnny). None of this badly acted, terribly written, lazily directed, cheaply produced 69 minute stewpot of mumbo’d gumbo has any reason to be mentioned, let alone watched, other than (a) we don’t put many of the countless B-programmers made during the 30’s-50’s on the site (b) historically this is a rare chance to see Tarzan/Jungle Jim tangle with Flash Gordon/Buck Rodgers, and (c) mainly because it has a jokey tie-in with another lousy movie, the 1967 western flameout Welcome To Hard Times. *

On the emotive scale,Weissmuller, 42, doesn’t register many readily identifiable life signs, but, mimicking The Lord of The Apes frequent crocodile bouts he does get to wrestle & dispatch an alligator. Crabbe, 38, puts some flair into his rascal. Poor Virginia Grey, 29, who had actual acting talent (and was a hot number, if you’ll excuse the naked truth) was once again wasted in a piece of tripe. Others caught in the studio back-lot pretending to be Louisiana include Pedro de Cordoba, Edwin Maxwell and 14-year-old hopeful David Janssen. Written by Daniel Mainwaring (he had some viable credits), directed by William H. Pine, this managed to make it to position #125 in the box office roll call for 1946, its built-in Weissmuller-Tarzan bait out-grossing genuine quality pictures Bedlam, I See A Dark Stranger, Green For Danger and Beauty And The Beast.

Catfight in three…two…one

* The author E.L. Doctorow, whose 1960 novel became 1967’s dud Welcome To Hard Times, snarked about that bummer that it was “the second worst film ever made. The worst was Swamp Fire.” Which brought me to it and you to this. Blame to spare, guilt to share.

I know I’m not Jane, but I can swing a mean vine