Wild River

A young field administrator for the TVA comes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam on the Tennessee River..

• Director: Elia Kazan
• Genre:Drama / Romance
• Runtime:105 minutes

Cast

Montgomery Clift: Chuck Glover
Lee Remick : Carol Garth Baldwin
Jo Van Fleet : Ella Garth
Albert Salmi : Hank Bailey
Jay C. Flippen : Hamilton Garth (as J.C. Flippen)

The film tells the story of a young idealistic Tennessee Valley Authority administrator, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) who comes to a small town in Tennessee to enforce the clearing of the land to be flooded by a new dam on the Tennessee River in the early 1930s. An ageing 80-year-old matriarch, Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), refuses to sell her land to the federal government and the film anticipates much of the environmental debates concerning the artificial control of rivers.

Glover falls in love with the matriarch’s granddaughter, Carol Garth Baldwin (Lee Remick), and some scenes between them are remarkable for their erotic tension with no explicitness whatsoever. The film also portrays some of the racial issues in the South after the Great Depression. Filmed in Cinemascope, this work by Elia Kazan shows a deep understanding of the relationship of Nature and the Land with the individual in the United States, reminiscent of artistic and philosophical concerns coming from the 19th century.

Some of the panoramic scenes, with the river meandering by beautiful green hills, but with tree stumps on the foreground, are reminiscent of some landscape painting techniques of the Hudson River School. The acting is riveting—one of the renowned imprints of Elia Kazan as a movie director. Read more