Saturday night, sometime after 1 am, decades ago. We’d been passing the hash pipe around, and Swamp Fire, a 1946 Buster Crabbe-meets-Johnny Wiesmuller film, was on the box. About as bad as a C-grade programmer gets, but we were goofing on it.
Right around the one-hour mark, or eight minutes before it ended, the swamp fire finally happened. Flames filled the screen. And somebody at the station broadcasting the film (WOR or WNEW or WPIX) decided to have some fun. The words SWAMP FIRE began flashing on the screen, as if to say “it’s finally happening…the swamp fire has begun!” We couldn’t stop laughing, and soon concluded that the graveyard-shift station guy flashing the title was either bored to tears or was getting ripped with a friend…one or the other.
The screenwriter of Swamp Fire was Daniel Mainwaring, author of “Build My Gallows High” (novel) and the film adaptation, Out of the Past. It’s been claimed that the writer who wrote the most flavorful Out of the Past dialogue was the uncredited Frank Fenton.