Having seen this movie recently for the first time I can hardly believe that it was made in the same year as the Oscar-showered Elmer Gantry! Both are in Technicolor, both have several big stars. They depict about the same period (1930ies) and similar settings (rural America). But in style they are entirely different.
Wild River has the feel of a movie of the 1970ies. It is in large parts naturalistic. Most fascinating for me was the part played by Lee Remick, a young, sexually starved widowed mother. The way Remick plays her role (emotionally exhausted, unkempt yet very sensuous and somehow trashy") reminds me of parts played more than a decade later by actresses like Sissy Spacek or Jodie Foster. Her character starts a relationship with the TVA functionary played by Montgomery Clift. It seems to be based almost entirely on sexual attraction and is doomed from the start. The film shows this with a frankness and also a closeness that is much more naturalistic than similar scenes in more artistic" pictures of the period, like Kazan's Baby Doll or Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.
Equally surprising is the ambivalent attitude of the movie towards the activities of the TVA. The technocrats of that state agency are presented as completely ignorant as far as local customs are concerned. The Clift character literally drops out of the sky into Terra Incognita. It soon appears that he is not too sure about the noble cause he represents and would rather like to be somewhere else (this could be Clift's personal contribution to the movie). He drives a black car with TVA scrawled on it in shameful small white letters. It looks a little like a hearse. Clift plays one of those disoriented anti heroes - which is somehow unexpected in the context of the movie and gives it a subversive touch better known from younger movies dealing with openly ecological subjects.
MINOR SPOILERS
When the Clift character meets the matriarch on the island who refuses to vacate her farm, he reminds her that there's always the danger of the river running wild. I love things running wild", replies the matriarch triumphantly. This leaves the functionary speechless. In the end he succeeds in having the matriarch removed from the farm and her house burnt to the ground before the valley is flooded why not just leave it where it is and let it submerge? Probably this unnecessarily brutal act (incidentally performed by African Americans) should have symbolized the cleansing of the Old South of bad customs and narrow mindedness. The effect, however, is wasted as the matriarch comes through as a difficult, openly racist yet somehow heroic" character with principles. She garners more sympathies with the viewers than the TVA representative who is just a man of the system and not a particularly likable one.
The end of the movie shows the TVA man flying off again with the young widow he married (against his and her better judgment) and her children. He is pointing at a dam far, far below, toy like and removed. That seems to be the right place for him to look at things! Sometimes one feels many decision makers of today still choose that perspective and that perspective alone.
Wild River has the feel of a movie of the 1970ies. It is in large parts naturalistic. Most fascinating for me was the part played by Lee Remick, a young, sexually starved widowed mother. The way Remick plays her role (emotionally exhausted, unkempt yet very sensuous and somehow trashy") reminds me of parts played more than a decade later by actresses like Sissy Spacek or Jodie Foster. Her character starts a relationship with the TVA functionary played by Montgomery Clift. It seems to be based almost entirely on sexual attraction and is doomed from the start. The film shows this with a frankness and also a closeness that is much more naturalistic than similar scenes in more artistic" pictures of the period, like Kazan's Baby Doll or Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.
Equally surprising is the ambivalent attitude of the movie towards the activities of the TVA. The technocrats of that state agency are presented as completely ignorant as far as local customs are concerned. The Clift character literally drops out of the sky into Terra Incognita. It soon appears that he is not too sure about the noble cause he represents and would rather like to be somewhere else (this could be Clift's personal contribution to the movie). He drives a black car with TVA scrawled on it in shameful small white letters. It looks a little like a hearse. Clift plays one of those disoriented anti heroes - which is somehow unexpected in the context of the movie and gives it a subversive touch better known from younger movies dealing with openly ecological subjects.
MINOR SPOILERS
When the Clift character meets the matriarch on the island who refuses to vacate her farm, he reminds her that there's always the danger of the river running wild. I love things running wild", replies the matriarch triumphantly. This leaves the functionary speechless. In the end he succeeds in having the matriarch removed from the farm and her house burnt to the ground before the valley is flooded why not just leave it where it is and let it submerge? Probably this unnecessarily brutal act (incidentally performed by African Americans) should have symbolized the cleansing of the Old South of bad customs and narrow mindedness. The effect, however, is wasted as the matriarch comes through as a difficult, openly racist yet somehow heroic" character with principles. She garners more sympathies with the viewers than the TVA representative who is just a man of the system and not a particularly likable one.
The end of the movie shows the TVA man flying off again with the young widow he married (against his and her better judgment) and her children. He is pointing at a dam far, far below, toy like and removed. That seems to be the right place for him to look at things! Sometimes one feels many decision makers of today still choose that perspective and that perspective alone.