Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Ploydsge just watch it!

Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

jarrodmcdonald-1 I did enjoy this film but I thought its big weakness was that there was no motive for the scam. Or at least the audience was not told what it was. There had to be a reason behind the fraud. Like if Thomas Mitchell's character had been swindled by the victims, or if he had been an illegitimate member of the family, so he killed them off with an idea to sell the plantation and get what was rightfully his. None of those reasons are even remotely suggested.I assumed that Merle Oberon's character just happened to show up at the wrong time, so the husband and wife were enlisted to pose as her aunt and uncle. But how would they know whether or not she had ever seen a photograph of them, even if she had never met them? Plus it seems a little too convenient that the first man she meets at the train station in the beginning is a kind doctor who will save her. I guess we have to overlook some of this in order to enjoy the film as a piece of entertainment.It does work as entertainment. The story is stretched out over ninety minutes, but it allows us to glimpse different levels of society in the bayou. Sure, there are stereotypes, but the whole thing is still compelling enough to maintain our interest.

Robert J. Maxwell 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.

nomoons11 I'll just get right to the spoilers.First off we know right from the beginning that the aunt and uncle at the bayou estate aren't her real relatives. This was too easy to figure out. De Toth didn't set it up well enough to make us believe any way else.Second, you know if Elijah Cook Jr. is in the film, he's up to no good. Seein' that he knows all the people in the house and they vouch for him, it was safe to assume that they were all in whatever they were up to.Third...Seeing that the first shot in the film you see is "oil man" and wife drown in submarine accident but the daughter survives. This wasn't to hard to figure out why the fake relatives were at the country estate. MONEY!!!! this is hardly a film-noir. A suspense/drama/thriller..yes. For me, this film wasn't anything to write home about, but at least I can say..." I saw it".

bkoganbing 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.