Review of Wild River (1960) by Panayiota K — 17 Jun 2015

Being aware of the work of Director Elia Kazan , I never really had this film on my radar.

Thanks to Eureka Films and Martin Scorsese featuring the film in his Letter to Elia I decided to seek the film out and see if it ranked alongside the directors more celebrated works.

The film opens with footage of the Tennessee river bursting its banks ,we then move to the main action as Montgomery Clift plays a man tasked by the government in moving a stubborn old lady and her family from an island which will be flooded when a large dam is built.

The trouble is the lady in question has no desire to move and Clift causes more tension in the local town when he employs black workers alongside white workers to clear the land.

Amid all the tension Clift falls for the matriarch grand daughter played by Lee Remick which only adds more fuel to the local bigots fire.

Clift was always a haunted man after his 1956 car accident and here Kazan puts that to great use .

You feel every emotion written across his face and his performance is one of the very best I have seen in a studio picture .

Kazan makes great use of the cinemascope format in his location filming and again there is some guilt over what he did in in the red scare in the late 40s and 50s in Hollywood by giving the film a very prominent liberal tone.

I really let this film sneak up on me and I am glad for once that I did as its one of the best film of the late studio period.