Wild River
Elia Kazan (1960)
Wild River begins with shots of a wild river – black-and-white images of a house collapsing into flood waters, of nearly submerged cars. There follows an interview with a bewildered man, who has lost his wife, their three children and his father-in-law in the deluge. A voiceover then explains that in May 1933 the US Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), authorising it to build dams and buy up land on the shores of the repeatedly flooding Tennessee River. That is historical fact and the whole introduction has the look and sound of actual archive footage; in fact, it’s a very skilful simulation of newsreel. (The uncredited actor playing the bereaved man is remarkably authentic.) This economic, imaginative opening is a highlight – the visual highlight – of the film. Nothing in the colour picture that follows makes a comparable impression. Elia Kazan’s fifteenth feature got reasonably good notices but didn’t set the box office alight. There’s a mismatch between the big-picture look of Wild River, which was shot in CinemaScope, and Kazan’s handling of the story. This is often a strong drama but perhaps not in the way that audiences expected.
Adapted from a brace of novels[1], Paul Osborn’s screenplay sets in opposition Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), newly-arrived head of the TVA land purchasing office, and Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), an elderly matriarch whose family has lived for generations on an island on the Tennessee River and who refuses to sell her land to the government. On his first day in the job, Chuck visits Ella to try and reason with her and other members of the Garth clan: he ends up getting thrown in the river by her son John Joe (Big Jeff Bess). Another son, Hamilton (Jay C Flippen), comes to Chuck’s hotel room in the (fictional) town of Garthville to apologise and invite him back to the island. Chuck returns next day to hear Ella inveighing against Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. She demands that her black field hand Sam Johnson (Robert Earl Jones, James’s father) sell her his beloved dog. Sam is baffled and upset: he doesn’t want to part with the animal. Ella’s demand is a put-on for Chuck’s benefit – an analogy of her own, real predicament. She insists that she won’t budge, that attempts to tame the river are against nature.
Ella’s granddaughter Carol (Lee Remick), a young widow and mother of two small children (Judy Harris and Jim Menard), is silently hostile on Chuck’s first visit to the island but her attitude towards him soon changes and they fall in love. The dramatisation of this relationship is Wild River‘s chief asset, even if it comes to dominate more than is good for the film overall. Kazan is working with a clear, well-organised script, and the result is a proficient piece of storytelling. He pulls no punches in illustrating redneck prejudices – for example, the locals’ reaction to Chuck’s recruitment of blacks to the TVA labour force, working alongside whites and for the same rate of pay. But the vividly distinctive time and place evoked in the film’s prologue take second place to the central love story.
In some respects, this is an uncharacteristic Kazan piece: he keeps the melodrama on a tight rein. The set-piece vicious confrontations are only occasional. When the brutish cotton farmer Bailey (Albert Salmi) pays a menacing visit to Chuck in his hotel room, Kazan restricts himself to immediately before and after the assault there. There are no such elisions in the showdown between Bailey’s thugs and the protagonists but even this episode, although savage and upsetting, is impressive chiefly for the virtual gender role-reversal of Chuck and Carol in the fracas. Bailey knocks out Chuck with one punch. When Carol responds by leaping on Bailey, he whacks and floors her too. (This is enough for the local sheriff (Mike Dodd) finally to intervene. Until this point, he’s an amused spectator of the violence, assuring his deputy that Bailey’s men are ‘just having some fun’.) Chuck’s remark to Carol that ‘You were wonderful up there’ echoes the ‘My hero!’ praise that a woman (on the screen) traditionally gives a man who’s selflessly entered the fray on her behalf.
His preceding line – ‘I wish someday I could win just one fight’ – resonates not just with Chuck’s experience in Wild River but with the larger screen history of the man playing him. It’s a reminder of the anti-Semitic violence meted out to Noah Ackerman in The Young Lions – a reminder too that Montgomery Clift only once played a man good with his fists. Even then, we didn’t see him win a fight. Prewitt in From Here to Eternity had given up army boxing after one of his punches accidentally blinded an opponent; Prewitt’s refusal to go back in the ring puts him on the receiving end of a different kind of victimisation. Clift is so convincing as Chuck Glover that you wonder if the role was tailored for him. The script doesn’t supply Chuck with much backstory. His self-critical diffidence might have been baffling but Clift, right inside the character, makes sense of Chuck’s deep-seated lack of confidence. Immediately after their encounter with the Bailey gang, he proposes marriage to Carol but is quick to add, ‘I’ll probably regret it – I’m sure you’ll regret it’.) His mixture of charm and thoroughgoing hesitancy – sometimes expressed as complete physical and emotional immobility – makes it clear why Carol is drawn to Chuck and exasperated by him too.
Although Clift is never easy to watch in his later films, Wild River is nothing like as difficult a viewing experience as the previous year’s Suddenly, Last Summer: he’s much more alert in this, the only film that he and Kazan made together. The scenes between Clift and Lee Remick aren’t obviously exciting but they’re absorbing – and a fine example of what Kazan was prepared to do, in terms of giving his actors time to develop a complex dynamic. Kazan and Remick had worked before, on A Face in the Crowd; in the larger role of Carol, she gives one of her most emotionally detailed and engaging performances. The supporting cast includes, as well as those already mentioned, Frank Overton (as Carol’s local suitor), James Westerfield (the third of the Garth sons) and an uncredited Bruce Dern, making his screen debut. Chuck’s secretary at the TVA office is played by Barbara Loden, who would become Elia Kazan’s second wife.
Clift’s and Remick’s style of playing contrasts not just with that of the film’s baddies but also with Jo Van Fleet’s more conspicuously bravura acting. Ella Garth is in her eighties; Van Fleet was forty-four at the time. Make-up artist Ben Nye and hair stylist Helen Turpin did extraordinary work to make her such a credible octogenarian. There’s a considered quality to Van Fleet’s playing but she’s nonetheless admirable. One of her final moments is particularly powerful: the vanquished Ella, about to leave her home for the last time, shoots a gimlet-eyed, accusing look at her granddaughter.
Relocated and deracinated, Ella dies soon afterwards. Here too, Kazan is refreshingly restrained. The destruction of the Garth family home, although it has impact, is far from a melodramatic flourish. Ella’s death is reported, by Carol to Chuck. Kazan also delivers an unemphatically happy ending (a happy ending of any kind is unusual in a Montgomery Clift picture). The newlyweds, accompanied by Carol’s two children, leave the area for good, their airborne departure rhyming with Chuck’s solo arrival by plane at the start. Chuck, Carol and the two kids eventually disappear from shot. Elia Kazan finally focuses on the landscape with which his film memorably began but the initial urgency has gone. That isn’t a criticism: Wild River‘s conclusion has an appealingly calm, something’s-lost-but-something’s-gained flavour.
1 March 2020
[1] Dunbar’s Cove by Borden Deal and Mud on the Stars by William Bradford Huie.