Jean Renoir (1951)
Set and shot on location in West Bengal, on the banks of the Ganges, Jean Renoir’s first post-Hollywood and first colour film looks so much better than it sounds. I’d seen The River once before, about twenty years ago. Although I couldn’t recall it in detail, I did remember Renoir’s compelling evocation of a culture and rhythm of life far removed from their European (or American) equivalents. Now that I’ve seen the film again, I’m glad to realise that its strengths rather than its weaknesses stayed in my mind. The images created by Renoir and his nephew Claude, The River‘s cinematographer, are masterly. The flow of the narrative is often interrupted, though, when someone speaks. The acting, especially the delivery of lines, is mostly awkward. The abundant voiceover narration – comprising extracts from Renoir’s source material, Rumer Godden’s 1946 novel of the same name – now sounds deplorably condescending.
That may be unfair on Rumer Godden (a prolific novelist though I’ve never read her), who shares the screenplay credit with Renoir. According to Google’s AI overview, Godden, who spent most of her childhood in colonial India, combined ‘a deep, lifelong emotional attachment’ to the country ‘with a critical, clear-eyed view of British imperialism’. Yet The River’s retrospective narration, voiced by June Hillman (aka June Tripp), describes the indigenous Indians and the Hindu religion in persistently patronising language and tones. Without explicitly disparaging the Indians or Hinduism as primitive, the voice gives the impression that life for the natives, including religious life, is an enviably simple matter – something that’s just gone on for centuries without interruption or development – or hardship. But at least that smooth, belittling voice doesn’t obscure the vibrancy, and sometimes mystery, of what Renoir puts on the screen. A procession of workers at a jute mill. Diwali and spring festival rituals. The local flora, vividly coloured or, in the case of a pipal (sacred fig) tree, extraordinarily shaped.
The dramatis personae are a different matter. The narrator is the adult version of The River’s protagonist, early teenage Harriet (Patricia Walters) – the eldest of five children, whose mother (Nora Swinburne) is expecting a sixth child and whose father (Esmond Knight) manages the jute mill. When American war veteran ‘Captain’ John (Thomas E Breen), comes to stay with his elder cousin, ‘Mr’ John (Arthur Shields), Harriet, who keeps a secret diary and writes poems, experiences the pangs of first love, and a first love rival – poised and self-centred Valerie (Adrienne Corri), the late-teen daughter of the jute mill’s owner. Members of Harriet’s family’s house staff – the children’s nanny (Suprova Mukerjee), the gateman (Sajjan Singh) – are not the only significant non-white characters. There’s also Melanie (Radha Burnier), the widowed Mr John’s bi-racial daughter; her wealthy suitor (Trilak Jetley); and Kanu (Nimai Barik), a young Indian boy who is the best friend of Harriet’s only brother, Bogey (Richard R Foster).
The cast are a mixture of experienced actors – Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Nora Swinburne (and June Tripp) – and others with little or no professional experience. The names of Patricia Walters and Adrienne Corri appear with ‘Introducing …’ tags in the opening titles (although Corri had had a presumably small part in The Romantic Age (1949)). Thomas E Breen had played a few, mostly uncredited roles in post-war Hollywood films. Radha Burnier was an Indian classical dancer. It’s not hard to see why Adrienne Corri went on from The River to a relatively successful screen career, and you can tell who the pros are more generally (though this isn’t in all cases a compliment: Arthur Shields is very stagy). Nearly all the less experienced performers, hard as they try, are wooden. They’re showstoppers in just the wrong way: each time they start trying to act, they break the film’s rhythm. It seems no coincidence that one of the most effective contributions is from Nimai Barik, in a virtually non-speaking role, and that Radha Burnier’s dance sequence is such a highlight (a showstopper in the right way).
At one level, there is a kind of truth in the artless performances. Patricia Walters seems conscientiously eager to do things well, and her appearance and manner are likeably eccentric: when Harriet asks her mother ‘Am I beautiful?’, the amusingly kind reply – from a woman who really is (conventionally) beautiful – is, ‘You have an interesting little face, full of character’. Walters can’t begin to cope, though, with the emotional extremes that Harriet is meant to experience. It makes a kind of sense that, in this somewhat sealed-off white community, she and Valerie are both smitten with Captain John, never mind that Thomas Breen does not have film-star looks. Like his character, Breen really did fight in the Second World War and, also like Captain John, lost a leg in action. (And Harriet’s father is partially sighted, to take account of Esmond Knight’s loss of vision during recent military service.) In a scene where John slips and is furiously unable to get up without help, Breen conveys a depth of feeling that makes even more salient his unconvincing efforts to register emotion elsewhere in the story.
If this had been Jean Renoir’s first English-language film, you might think that, as a native French speaker, he just couldn’t ‘hear’ what Patricia Walters, Thomas Breen and others were doing with their lines; since Renoir came to The River after several years and films in Hollywood, this can’t suffice as an explanation. Still, the inadequate playing of the human characters, though a vexing distraction, doesn’t dominate your thoughts afterwards. What stays with you is, for example, Renoir’s characterisation of the Ganges, both real and symbolic (‘The river flows, the world spins’, in the words of one of Harriet’s poems), or his handling of the immediate aftermath to Bogey’s death from a cobra bite and the staging of the boy’s funeral. One of the script’s more incisive lines is another response from Harriet’s mother, when her eldest daughter protests to her parents during an evening meal after her brother’s death that, ‘We go on as if nothing had happened’: ‘No, we don’t,’ says her mother, ‘all we do is to go on’.
Bogey’s death is somewhat uncomfortable in that, as a white person’s death, it seems to reinforce the narrator’s assumption that it matters more – that lucky Indians simply take life and death in their stride. Yet this prioritisation has a more positive side. It’s a virtue of Renoir’s approach to Rumer Godden’s material, and an expression of his film-making artistry, that, as Pauline Kael wrote, he ‘does not usurp the position of an insider; he sees India with western eyes – eyes so sensitive and highly trained that his vision of India is a mythic poem’.
20 June 2026
