Blockbuster History: Swamp women
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Where the Crawdads Sing tells the story of a young woman who lives and thrives in a swampland, away from self-described "civilisation", and who becomes the target of a vengeful mob after she's accused of murder. It's clearly being positioned as a warm and even inspiring prestige picture; what if instead it was an example of incredibly tawdry regional exploitation cinema?
I don't know much of anything about Beverly & Ferd Sebastian, but they seem like a couple of fascinating human beings. They were a married couple of regional filmmakers who spent all of the '70s & '80s, with a little spillover into the decades on either side, making what sounds like just utterly sordid exploitation trash, and having run out the market on regional exploitation films (by a lot of years, actually, but I'm glad they held strong), retired to run a foundation rescuing ex-racing greyhounds. As far as I can tell, they're still alive; as far I can tell, they're still married; it's at least possible that Ferd became an evangelical preacher, but I suppose it's also possible that there are two men named Ferd Sebastian. But I hope not, I enjoy the idea of somebody who eked out a living making gutter trash cinema deciding later in life that he had to atone for it. It promises that the films must have been something.
If nothing else, the Sebastians are exactly the sort of colorful characters who make the regional indie exploitation cinema of the southeastern United States one of the great underexplored treasure troves of... whatever the hell it's a trove of. Real interesting shit, anyways, and the particular example of the form I'm here to spring on you is probably the Sebastians' best-known film, 1974's 'Gator Bait. Just the story of how the project came into being tells us a thing or two about the sort of filmmakers these were, and the sort of filmmaking industry they were a part of: it came about because they were making a sexploitation horror-comedy, The Single Girls, which at least sounds like it might be a proto-slasher. And on the set of this film, they struck up a friendship with its star, Claudia Jennings, whose first big claim to fame was that she was Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1970, but who then devoted herself with ferocious intensity to making it as an actress in exploitation cinema, appearing in 17 features and 12 television episodes across the course of the 1970s, before her death in a car accident at only 29 years old. The Sebastians immediately set themselves to fashioning a starring vehicle made just for Jennings, and Beverly's instinct as a screenwriter (which certainly seems to have been correct) is that the best approach would to have her run around in a thigh-length deerhide chemise with a neckline that went down to her navel, wielding a shotgun and a determined attempt at a "Cajun" accent.
Thus: 'Gator Bait, a film that contains all of that and plenty more. The film is an exemplary demonstration of one of golden rules of filmmaking on no budget: if you can get a cheap location, exploit the hell out of it. And oh, how very successfully 'Gator Bait does exploit its setting, a swamp played by bayous in Louisiana and Texas. It's startling, in fact, just how richly atmospheric the film actually is: Ferd Sebastian (who served as the cinematographer) had a pretty terrific eye for capturing the expansiveness of the swamps while also making them feel close and claustrophic, as trees ring them all around. The versions of 'Gator Bait that one can most readily watch these days are in an open-matte format, losing the originally-intended 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio, but even with too much space on the top and bottom of the frame, it's impressive how right some of these compositions feel. The film manages to tap into a feeling of the untouched richness of nature, both as a place of idyllic beauty and a place full of wonderful terrors beyond the human - it's presenting the bayou as both an extraordinary environment and a space that the human characters simply are not supposed to be, and tough shit for them that it's going to kill them. And it does all of this quite crisply and efficiently - no Malickian moments lingering on the gravity of the natural world, we have an 88-minute violent revenge thriller to plow through. So all of these lovely compositions go hand-in-hand with shots of, like, speedboat chases. It is, sincerely, an incredible thing.
The revenge thriller is itself a bit craftier than it needs to be. Certainly, it sounds like it should be more straightforward than it actually is; there's a bit of coily sneakiness to the way the narrative twists around. Desiree (Jennings) is a poacher living in a shack deep in the swamp with her younger siblings, Julie (Janit Baldwin) and Big T (Tracy Sebastian, the directors' son). Her legend is well-known throughout these parts, apparently; at any rate, a pair of real disgusting sorts, Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian, the directors' other son) and Deputy Billy Boy Thomas (Clyde Ventura), have decided that it would be a very fun thing to do to find Desiree wherever she is, poaching whatever animals she oughtn't be, and sexually assault her. And they do find her, but that's as far as it goes, because she figures out instantaneously that they're up to this or something like it, and so she immediately goes on the counterattack, doing something so incredibly delightful within the context of "I am watching a seedy trash movie and want to have a blast doing so", I feel kind of bad spoiling it.
She throws a burlap sackful of cottonmouths onto the bad guys' boat! It is one of the great moments in hicksploitation cinema that I have seen. The only real problem with it is that it means that 'Gator Bait has peaked unaccountably early, and you can sort of tell in the moment that's the case. At any rate, the men freak out, as they might, and Billy Boy starts shooting, and gosh darn it, he accidentally puts a bullet right between Ben's eyes. The latter man falls out of the boat and sinks in the brown murk slowly, in a shot that does a particularly nice job of showcasing the Sebastian's knack for knowing how to let a beat play out for good atmosphere. Now, Billy Boy tears ass back to his dad, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman), and tries to pin the blame on Desiree. Sheriff Joe doesn't seem impressed by this at all - mostly, he just seems annoyed that his damn fool son messed with a woman well known to all and sundry as somebody better left well alone - until Billy Boy further blames her for the loss of the sheriff's new boat. And then the sheriff decides to raise hell.
One of the more subtly clever things about 'Gator Bait is the way it goes about sketching out its litany of horrendous, horrendous men - we still have three to go; Ben's wrathful father T.J. Bracken (Sam Gilman), and Ben's brothers, the idiot Pete (Don Baldwin), and the sadistic Leroy (Doug Dirkson), the latter of whom also has another reason to want to find and kill Desiree; when he himself tried to find and rape her in the swamp, as his brother lately tried to do, she cut off his testicles. What's clever is that they're all broadly the same kind of disgusting scum who want Desiree dead, and are willing to use her young siblings as bait to make that happen (including the shockingly blunt death of one of the two), but when we winnow down to the specifics, they all have their own uniquely repulsive personalities, so we hate each one of them in a different register. Heck, they're not even all rapists. Which is a claim that one would only feel compelled to make of a '70s exploitation film. But that's the interesting thing, Beverly Sebastian's script distinguishes between the men by modulating why we find them heinous and/or revolting. And it works! I had a much easier time keeping the villains of 'Gator Bait separate than I would have anticipated given that they spend most of the film proceeding forward as a kind of malicious mass.
The movie is, as a whole, pretty smart about how to construct itself. I don't want to call it "thinking man's exploitation cinema", since it's still rooting around in the gutter, and Jennings's cleavage is still arguably a main character independent of Jennings herself, so we're not in, like, classy territory. But it's judicious, and well-built. The Sebastians really did seem to earnestly want to construct a film around Jennings's strengths and limitations as an actor and screen presence, and I don't mean "screen presence" in a euphemistic way. In fact, one of the film's surprises is that Jennings never gets naked, perhaps because the directors knew that her flimsy costume was sexier than coarse nudity would be; that's the kind of thing I mean by "judicious" (though they also knew the market they were selling to, so Baldwin does have a brief nude scene). No, Jennings actually does have a kind of feral animalist rage that she's able to tap into, which gives Desiree enough ferocity that we can actually believe that this skinny slip of a figure can outfight a bunch of raging, angry rednecks. It's not precisely "acting", because when she tries to precisely "act", the results go a bit wrong; the Cajun accent is notoriously difficult, and Jennings was neither its first victim nor its last. But it's still a little bit of a relief when she acts with her eyes rather than with words. And so, Desiree is largely given to action rather than speaking; but given that she's spending most of the movie setting traps for and then killing the bad men, it doesn't feel unnatural. She wouldn't have anything to say to them.
There are other ways in which this is an unusually thoughtful production, for what it is. Ferd Sebastian's score offers an unexpected counterpoint to the action, something softer and more reflective, especially in the surprisingly decent schmaltzy ballad sung by Lee Darin. Editor Ron Johnson's cross-cutting creates a pretty appealing, rangy amount of pacing; the film always moves forward, but not always at the same rate, so it's not monotonous. And not to belabor a point, but there's some remarkable nice nature photography framing the action sequences. Which are all curt and purposeful, if sadly never so delectable as the bag o' snakes from the opening sequence. Still, it's a pretty fine mixture of crass appeal and confident execution. I certainly don't want to make too many claims for 'Gator Bait - it's still a movie whose chief appeal is contained within the phrase "a woman with almost no clothes on kills would-be rapists with a shotgun and leaves them to rot in swamp water". But it's an extremely satisfying version of that thing, if that thing holds literally any attraction for you whatsoever.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
I don't know much of anything about Beverly & Ferd Sebastian, but they seem like a couple of fascinating human beings. They were a married couple of regional filmmakers who spent all of the '70s & '80s, with a little spillover into the decades on either side, making what sounds like just utterly sordid exploitation trash, and having run out the market on regional exploitation films (by a lot of years, actually, but I'm glad they held strong), retired to run a foundation rescuing ex-racing greyhounds. As far as I can tell, they're still alive; as far I can tell, they're still married; it's at least possible that Ferd became an evangelical preacher, but I suppose it's also possible that there are two men named Ferd Sebastian. But I hope not, I enjoy the idea of somebody who eked out a living making gutter trash cinema deciding later in life that he had to atone for it. It promises that the films must have been something.
If nothing else, the Sebastians are exactly the sort of colorful characters who make the regional indie exploitation cinema of the southeastern United States one of the great underexplored treasure troves of... whatever the hell it's a trove of. Real interesting shit, anyways, and the particular example of the form I'm here to spring on you is probably the Sebastians' best-known film, 1974's 'Gator Bait. Just the story of how the project came into being tells us a thing or two about the sort of filmmakers these were, and the sort of filmmaking industry they were a part of: it came about because they were making a sexploitation horror-comedy, The Single Girls, which at least sounds like it might be a proto-slasher. And on the set of this film, they struck up a friendship with its star, Claudia Jennings, whose first big claim to fame was that she was Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1970, but who then devoted herself with ferocious intensity to making it as an actress in exploitation cinema, appearing in 17 features and 12 television episodes across the course of the 1970s, before her death in a car accident at only 29 years old. The Sebastians immediately set themselves to fashioning a starring vehicle made just for Jennings, and Beverly's instinct as a screenwriter (which certainly seems to have been correct) is that the best approach would to have her run around in a thigh-length deerhide chemise with a neckline that went down to her navel, wielding a shotgun and a determined attempt at a "Cajun" accent.
Thus: 'Gator Bait, a film that contains all of that and plenty more. The film is an exemplary demonstration of one of golden rules of filmmaking on no budget: if you can get a cheap location, exploit the hell out of it. And oh, how very successfully 'Gator Bait does exploit its setting, a swamp played by bayous in Louisiana and Texas. It's startling, in fact, just how richly atmospheric the film actually is: Ferd Sebastian (who served as the cinematographer) had a pretty terrific eye for capturing the expansiveness of the swamps while also making them feel close and claustrophic, as trees ring them all around. The versions of 'Gator Bait that one can most readily watch these days are in an open-matte format, losing the originally-intended 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio, but even with too much space on the top and bottom of the frame, it's impressive how right some of these compositions feel. The film manages to tap into a feeling of the untouched richness of nature, both as a place of idyllic beauty and a place full of wonderful terrors beyond the human - it's presenting the bayou as both an extraordinary environment and a space that the human characters simply are not supposed to be, and tough shit for them that it's going to kill them. And it does all of this quite crisply and efficiently - no Malickian moments lingering on the gravity of the natural world, we have an 88-minute violent revenge thriller to plow through. So all of these lovely compositions go hand-in-hand with shots of, like, speedboat chases. It is, sincerely, an incredible thing.
The revenge thriller is itself a bit craftier than it needs to be. Certainly, it sounds like it should be more straightforward than it actually is; there's a bit of coily sneakiness to the way the narrative twists around. Desiree (Jennings) is a poacher living in a shack deep in the swamp with her younger siblings, Julie (Janit Baldwin) and Big T (Tracy Sebastian, the directors' son). Her legend is well-known throughout these parts, apparently; at any rate, a pair of real disgusting sorts, Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian, the directors' other son) and Deputy Billy Boy Thomas (Clyde Ventura), have decided that it would be a very fun thing to do to find Desiree wherever she is, poaching whatever animals she oughtn't be, and sexually assault her. And they do find her, but that's as far as it goes, because she figures out instantaneously that they're up to this or something like it, and so she immediately goes on the counterattack, doing something so incredibly delightful within the context of "I am watching a seedy trash movie and want to have a blast doing so", I feel kind of bad spoiling it.
She throws a burlap sackful of cottonmouths onto the bad guys' boat! It is one of the great moments in hicksploitation cinema that I have seen. The only real problem with it is that it means that 'Gator Bait has peaked unaccountably early, and you can sort of tell in the moment that's the case. At any rate, the men freak out, as they might, and Billy Boy starts shooting, and gosh darn it, he accidentally puts a bullet right between Ben's eyes. The latter man falls out of the boat and sinks in the brown murk slowly, in a shot that does a particularly nice job of showcasing the Sebastian's knack for knowing how to let a beat play out for good atmosphere. Now, Billy Boy tears ass back to his dad, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman), and tries to pin the blame on Desiree. Sheriff Joe doesn't seem impressed by this at all - mostly, he just seems annoyed that his damn fool son messed with a woman well known to all and sundry as somebody better left well alone - until Billy Boy further blames her for the loss of the sheriff's new boat. And then the sheriff decides to raise hell.
One of the more subtly clever things about 'Gator Bait is the way it goes about sketching out its litany of horrendous, horrendous men - we still have three to go; Ben's wrathful father T.J. Bracken (Sam Gilman), and Ben's brothers, the idiot Pete (Don Baldwin), and the sadistic Leroy (Doug Dirkson), the latter of whom also has another reason to want to find and kill Desiree; when he himself tried to find and rape her in the swamp, as his brother lately tried to do, she cut off his testicles. What's clever is that they're all broadly the same kind of disgusting scum who want Desiree dead, and are willing to use her young siblings as bait to make that happen (including the shockingly blunt death of one of the two), but when we winnow down to the specifics, they all have their own uniquely repulsive personalities, so we hate each one of them in a different register. Heck, they're not even all rapists. Which is a claim that one would only feel compelled to make of a '70s exploitation film. But that's the interesting thing, Beverly Sebastian's script distinguishes between the men by modulating why we find them heinous and/or revolting. And it works! I had a much easier time keeping the villains of 'Gator Bait separate than I would have anticipated given that they spend most of the film proceeding forward as a kind of malicious mass.
The movie is, as a whole, pretty smart about how to construct itself. I don't want to call it "thinking man's exploitation cinema", since it's still rooting around in the gutter, and Jennings's cleavage is still arguably a main character independent of Jennings herself, so we're not in, like, classy territory. But it's judicious, and well-built. The Sebastians really did seem to earnestly want to construct a film around Jennings's strengths and limitations as an actor and screen presence, and I don't mean "screen presence" in a euphemistic way. In fact, one of the film's surprises is that Jennings never gets naked, perhaps because the directors knew that her flimsy costume was sexier than coarse nudity would be; that's the kind of thing I mean by "judicious" (though they also knew the market they were selling to, so Baldwin does have a brief nude scene). No, Jennings actually does have a kind of feral animalist rage that she's able to tap into, which gives Desiree enough ferocity that we can actually believe that this skinny slip of a figure can outfight a bunch of raging, angry rednecks. It's not precisely "acting", because when she tries to precisely "act", the results go a bit wrong; the Cajun accent is notoriously difficult, and Jennings was neither its first victim nor its last. But it's still a little bit of a relief when she acts with her eyes rather than with words. And so, Desiree is largely given to action rather than speaking; but given that she's spending most of the movie setting traps for and then killing the bad men, it doesn't feel unnatural. She wouldn't have anything to say to them.
There are other ways in which this is an unusually thoughtful production, for what it is. Ferd Sebastian's score offers an unexpected counterpoint to the action, something softer and more reflective, especially in the surprisingly decent schmaltzy ballad sung by Lee Darin. Editor Ron Johnson's cross-cutting creates a pretty appealing, rangy amount of pacing; the film always moves forward, but not always at the same rate, so it's not monotonous. And not to belabor a point, but there's some remarkable nice nature photography framing the action sequences. Which are all curt and purposeful, if sadly never so delectable as the bag o' snakes from the opening sequence. Still, it's a pretty fine mixture of crass appeal and confident execution. I certainly don't want to make too many claims for 'Gator Bait - it's still a movie whose chief appeal is contained within the phrase "a woman with almost no clothes on kills would-be rapists with a shotgun and leaves them to rot in swamp water". But it's an extremely satisfying version of that thing, if that thing holds literally any attraction for you whatsoever.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
