Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941)

In Renoir's films man's natural surroundings are almost always prominently featured, and it is this emphasis on man in his environment photographed by an unblinking camera that is the true precursor of neorealism.
--Andrew Sarris

When Renoir fled Paris after the Nazis marched in he was welcomed in Hollywood, where La Grande Illusion (1937) was known and admired.  It was thought that Renoir would do something "French" but instead he chose a script by Dudley Nichols, who had written films for John Ford, then in the Navy.  Swamp Water has many Fordian elements, including the actors Russell Simpson, John Carradine and Ward Bond (who plays a similar role -- a man who killed and blamed it on someone else --to his role in Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,  1939) as well as a barn dance and the use of "Red River Valley" on the soundtrack.  But where Ford always emphasized the positive aspects of community and tradition Renoir emphasizes the individual and his and her struggles.  Keefer (Walter Brennan) was convicted of murder and fled to the swamps, where he hooks up with Ben (Dana Andrews) to trap together.  Keefer has acclimated himself to the swamp so that even when bitten by a cottonmouth he is able to will himself to be well, though Ben has already dug a grave for him.

Meanwhile the community on the edge of the swamp is full of hostilities and infidelities and tries to kill Ben when he brings Keefer's outcast daughter (Anne Baxter) to the barn dance. Ben finally convinces a witness to the murder, Jesse (played by Carradine) to confess, or else he will tell his father, Thursday (played by Walter Huston), that Jesse has been sneaking over to court Ben's stepmother.  Typically Renoir does not gives us any information about the murder itself, he is more interested in the people involved and their complex motives.  The swamp has been used often to represent hostile nature (King Vidor's Hallelujah, 1929, is one of my favorite examples) and in Renoir's film nobody can survive in it indefinitely; Keefer is freed from the swamp while the real killers are exiled there, one of them dying in quicksand.  It remains a question whether the community to which Keefer returns can be healed or whether the symbol of a skull on a cross with which the film opened will prevail.