Swamp Women

 ( 1956 Films ) 

Jonathan Haze, who worked with Corman a number of times, had a small role in the movie and also worked as a fight co ordinator for the women. He says the Woolner brothers had him arrested and put in prison as a joke, but called them "really good people. They played hard-guy, but deep down they were nice. Barney was always in a hurry, while Larry was much more cool and quiet, and not so much of a character.”

Beverly Garland, who would go on to make several films with Corman, called the movie:

A terrible thing! Roger put us up in this old, abandoned hotel... I mean, it was really abandoned!... I'm surprised that the hotel had running water! I remember that we each had a room with an iron bed. Our first night there, I went to bed, and I heard this tremendous crash! I went screaming into Marie Windsor's room, and there she was with the bed on top of her— the whole bed had collapsed! Well, we started laughing because everything was so awful in this hotel, just incredibly terrible, and we became good friends.

Mike Connors recalled, "the girls in that picture had it much worse than I did. They were playing escaped convicts, and they captured me. They had to trudge through the mud, the swamps, pulling this rowboat, and I was sitting in the rowboat high and dry." However at the end of the film he had to dive into the water which "had snakes and stuff in it, and it was just terrible. But to Roger, it was like shrugs, 'So you get bit by a snake — big deal!' It was a horrendous experience, I'll tell you — just the worst."

Connors said he had to do scenes near an alligator in the water (it was tied up) and a rattlesnake which crawled over his leg (its mouth was taped). "I had nightmares for weeks after I got back, about that.. .big snake," said Connors.

Ed Nelson, later of Peyton Place fame, was living in New Orleans at the time, working as a floor manager for WDSU, when he heard of the film. "I had the gut feeling that being a part of the Corman group would boost my career," Nelson said. "I was right."

Nelson got himself a job behind the scenes on the movie and eventually was cast as a cop as well. Nelson later said, "I did everything: I was the location manager, I wrestled the alligator. I held it up in the water so that Mike Touch Connors could wrestle it. " He added, ""This included bringing the limited supply of hot water to the almost primitive hotel rooms at the Georgian Manor so the performers and crew could bathe. I made hot coffee for the cast and crew, and maintained a cooler of cold Barq's Root Beer, Louisiana's favorite soft drink, when the heat was at its worst."

Wild animals, such as an alligator and a rattlesnake, were hired from Arthur Jones, who then ran a roadside attraction off Highway 11 in Slidell.

At the end of the film Garland's character was killed with a spear and fell out of a tree. She recalled:

They got me up in this tree and Roger said, "When you're killed, you have to drop"— and this was a big tree! I'm not exaggerating when I say it was at least a 20-foot drop. I said, "Well, will somebody be there?" And Roger said, "Yes, they’ll catch you." And by God, they had three guys underneath. And when they killed me, I just fell— dead weight- on these three poor guys! Roger said to me, "You're really one of the best stuntwomen I have ever worked with."