Both sections of the flavorful, vernacular-filled screen play have been given professional treatment.
Wild River
The Wild Language... The Wild Hungers... The Wild Furies!
1960 · 1h 50m · APPROVED
Drama, Romance
Directed by
Elia Kazan
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Wild River
Overview
A young bureaucrat for the Tennessee Valley Authority goes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam. He encounters opposition from the local people, in particular a farmer who objects to his employment (with pay) of local black laborers. Much of the plot revolves around the eviction of a stubborn octogenarian from her home on an island in the river, and the young man's love affair with that woman's widowed granddaughter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation.
Director and cast
- Elia Kazan Director
- Montgomery Clift as Chuck Glover
- Lee Remick as Carol Garth Baldwin
- Jo Van Fleet as Ella Garth
- Albert Salmi as Hank Bailey
- Jay C. Flippen as Hamilton Garth (as J.C. Flippen)
- James Westerfield as Cal Garth
- Bruce Dern as Jack Roper
- Barbara Loden as Betty Jackson
- Frank Overton as Walter Clark
- Malcolm Atterbury Cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
This 1960 drama is probably Elia Kazan's finest and deepest film, a meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present.
In studying a slice of national socio-economic progress in terms of people, it catches something timeless and essential in the human spirit and shapes it in the American image.
One of [Kazan's] least theatrical and most affecting films.
Kazan's films are better known for showcasing stratospheric Method-emoting over visual expressiveness, which makes Wild River's gorgeous imagery a shock...
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