Wild River (1960)

In the middle of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority is building dams across the great river to prevent the calamitous periodic floods and provide jobs for the people of Appalachia. Montgomery Clift arrives in a small town as the TVA agent to see that everything is in order before the new dam submerges the farm acreage behind it.Some folks 'round here like it; most don't. They'll sell, though, because the TVA offers a fair price and, heck, ain't nothing' doin' 'round here anyhow. But one of the hold outs, who REALLY objects to being displaced, is old Ella Garth, Jo Van Fleet, who owns an island in the middle of the river.How is Clift going to get her out of her broken-down ancient house and off her devitalized farm? That's Problem A. Problem B is that Clift enlists the aid of Van Fleet's granddaughter, the distraught and horny Lee Remick. She has two small children, is engaged to a local nonentity, Frank Overton, and she falls desperately in love with him. Her grandma might not be much for social change, but, man, is Remick ready for a change in circumstances. What's Clift going to do about HER? There are ancillary problems. Albert Salmi runs a tiny cotton plantation and is the leader of the anti-TVA faction in town. He's paying his black cotton pickers two dollars a day and the TVA is offering "the coloreds" five dollars. This discrepancy causes Salmi to offer active resistance to Clift and his plans.Van Fleet does an impeccable job as the tough old lady. Such roles are her strong suit. She's played variations on the role a number of times, yet ALL of her tough old broads are different from one another. There is probably a "tough old lady" default setting somewhere in Van Fleet's repertoire but she doesn't activate it. One of her tough old ladies is always slightly different from the others. This one is uniformly sullen and unsmiling and imbued with dignity.Lee Remick gets the job done, but I'm not sure about Montgomery Clift. This was after his accident and he was no longer the beautiful young man. On top of that he was going through booze and prescription drugs at an alarming rate. He's skinny and tic-ridden. When a distracted Remick swishes past him in her tight Levis, and Clift blinks, and remarks, "I wish you wouldn't walk like that," it's a little hard to believe him because he doesn't seem virile enough. Nobody wants John Wayne, but just someone with a little more masculine heft. Clift is fine being clobbered by Salmi in a fist fight, though, and getting drunk afterward.Elia Kazan directs the story from William Bradford Huie's novel. Huie, as most Southern writers of the period were doing, showed us the human side of the isolated Southern redneck stereotype. It's more complicated than you outsiders seem to think. Kazan honors the intent. The incidents we witness -- the politeness pregnant with violence -- is thoroughly convincing. It's about as far from "To Kill a Mockingbird" and its humanistic platitudes as you can get. Salmi's character is despicable, true, but also reasonable and practical given his subculture. He doesn't beat his black worker because the guy is black, but because he's breaking the rules. We got our own kinda rules around here, Mister. John Wayne would have approved.Anyway, if you can put up with the absence of a clear distinction between what the rest of us consider "good" and "bad", if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone very different from the kind of people most of us are, you'll get a lot of help from Elia Kazan and you'll understand that social change doesn't take place without some kind of sacrifice.

This movie features Jo van Fleet, a terrific actress who has been forgotten.As usual, her performance carries the movie.Some should remember her as the mother of the James Dean character in East of Eden, where her scenes with Dean are the most powerful in the film.Elia Kazan, who directed Wild River, also directed East of Eden.Kazan said in an interview he considered van Fleet a "great" actress, and expressed irritation that she had been "forgotten."In Wild River the character she plays so believably is decades older than she actually was.One previous reviewer here is so fixated on politics that he really uses his pretense of reviewing this movie to give his own personal political views, which are of no interest to me, and which do not belong in a forum of this type.

This nearly forgotten film from director Elia Kazan has a plot line closer to a Stanley Kramer film, albeit without the bombast. A government man, played by Montgomery Clift in his last great performance, tries to persuade the matriarch of a backwoods family to sell her land so a river can be routed through it. Clift's performance is matched by the always terrific Jo Van Fleet (only 40ish, but playing 80ish --- Kazan clearly indulges her). Van Fleet's performance is electrifying. Although there is a subplot involving Clift and Lee Remick, it takes a back seat to the Clift-Van Fleet showdown. Remick is terrific and Jay C. Flippin is a plus as one of Van Fleet's more intelligent "boys." A couple of drawbacks: the movie's widescreen and color photography soften its overall impact. There's no real sense that this is the 1930s. Nonetheless, WILD RIVER remains Kazan's nearly forgotten, near masterpiece.

This is a most remarkable film, chronicling a piece of Americana and presenting a compelling image of the tragedy of progress. And it is Jo Van Fleet whose utterly convincing and captivating portrayal of an 80-year old hillbilly woman (she herself was 45 years old) makes WILD RIVER a masterpiece. To reiterate what others have stated, the fact that her performance was not even nominated for an Oscar is an outrage! I tend to disagree with other reviewers in regards to the subplot between Monty Clift and Lee Remick; I feel their scene slow things down and I find myself fast-forwarding past them to get to the match of will between Clift and Van Fleet. I do, however, understand the necessity of the Chuck/Carol love affair - here you have a stubborn old woman who simply refuses to leave her lifelong home and a sensuous young woman who simply begs to get out! And Monty Clift becomes nemesis and savior. But their scenes together are a total yawn when the good stuff involves the reason Clift is there to begin with - not just his cat-and-mouse with Van Fleet, but all the other obstacles he faces from the rest of the populace of the rural south in the 1930's.Still, an incredible film and worth viewing over and over again.