Wild River **** (1960, Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, Albert Salmi, Jay C Flippen) – Classic Movie Review 4,052

Elia Kazan’s 1960 drama film Wild River hands a grand role to Jo Van Fleet as the obstinate Alabama matriarch Ella Garth who clashes with 1930s young Tennessee Valley Authority field administrator Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift). 

Producer-director Elia Kazan’s 1960 American drama film Wild River hands a grand role to Jo Van Fleet as the obstinate elderly Alabama matriarch Ella Garth who clashes with 1930s young Tennessee Valley Authority field administrator Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), who embodies progress and tolerance – but at a price.

Ella refuses to give up her land and home on an island in the river to allow Chuck to finish his river project of building of a dam on the Tennessee River. But he is helped in his fight with the bigoted community when he starts a love affair with Ella’s widowed granddaughter, Carol (Lee Remick).

Clift and director Kazan don’t seem to have their feet firmly enough on the ground. But Van Fleet gives a commanding performance, Remick is touching and Kazan is painstaking as usual in exposing an unusual corner of America. 

The film was shot on location in the Tennessee Valley, with exteriors filmed on Coon Denton Island on the Hiwassee River, in Charleston’s old business district and on a peninsula on Chickamauga Lake. A studio was created in the Cleveland armoury.

Paul Osborn’s screenplay is based on William Bradford Huie’s Mud on the Stars and Borden Deal’s Dunbar’s Cove. Osborn takes his plot from Deal’s story of a battle of wills between the new Tennessee Valley Authority and generations-old land owners, and from Huie’s study of a rural Southern matriarchal family for characters and their reaction to destruction of their land.

Wild River is Bruce Dern’s first film, aged 24, uncredited as Jack Roper.

Also in the cast are Albert Salmi, Jay C Flippen, James Westerfield, Barbara Loden, Frank Overton, Malcolm Atterbury, Big Jeff Bless, John Dudley, Judy Harris, Robert Earl Jones, Jim Menard, Mark Menson, Patricia Perry, Alfred E Smith, and Jim Steakley.

Wild River is directed by Elia Kazan, runs 110 minutes, is made by 20th Century Fox, is distributed by 20th Century Fox, is written by Paul Osborn, is shot in DeLuxe Color by Ellsworth Fredricks, is produced by Elia Kazan, and is scored by Kenyon Hopkins.

Release date: May 25, 1960.

Kazan was a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist. His ‘friendly’ testimony helped to end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky, Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets. He justified his action as taking ‘only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong’.

The cast are Montgomery Clift as Chuck Glover, Lee Remick as Carol Garth Baldwin, Jo Van Fleet as Ella Garth, Albert Salmi as R J Bailey, Jay C Flippen as Hamilton Garth, James Westerfield as Cal Garth, Barbara Loden as Betty Jackson, Frank Overton as Walter Clark, Malcolm Atterbury as Sy Moore, Bruce Dern as Jack Roper, Robert Earl Jones as Sam Johnson, Big Jeff Bless, John Dudley, Judy Harris, Jim Menard, Mark Menson, Patricia Perry, Alfred E Smith, and Jim Steakley.

The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive, and it was selected for the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4,052

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