Too much of everything

Simply A Masterpiece

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

A young field administrator (Montgomery Clift though first choice was Marlon Brando) for the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) comes to rural Tennessee to carry out what none of his predecessors have been able , he has to oversee the building of a dam on the Tennessee River . As the dam is already built downstream with that section of the valley soon to be flooded . He finds opposition the local people , in especial from a farmer who objects to his employment of local black workers . He attempts to evict the stubborn octogenarian (Jo Van Fleet) from her home on an island in the River before the rising waters engulf her , but things go wrong . Meanwhile , the young man has a love affair with that woman's widowed (Lee Remick) granddaughter . One of the real problems is that Carol is engaged to kind and caring Walter Clark (Frank Overton) , a man she doesn't like and would only marry for a father for her two small kiddies .Here Elia Kazan reflects the peculiar characters , rural sets in realism way , folkloric customs , glimmer landscapes as well as evocative interior homes . Much of the screenplay revolves around the eviction of an elderly woman and Kazan achieves a real emotion and sensibility by means of slow-moving scenes and close-ups of protagonists . This dramatic story is full of dialogues dealing with essential and fundamental feelings as family love , lands , friendship or tradition . Elia Kazan is capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses , as Montgomery Clift , as a TVA bureaucrat who comes to evict people , gives a very good acting , though at the time of the film , Clift was alcoholic and sick . Lee Remick as an unfortunate and attractive widow is pretty good . Support cast is frankly excellent , such as : Albert Salmi , Jay C. Flippen , Frank Overton , Barbara Loden , Pat Hingle , James Westerfield , film debut of Bruce Dern and Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones . Special mention for Jo Van Fleet who steals the show as obstinate and proud grandmother.The motion picture was well directed by Elia Kazan and considered to be one of the best films of the year , he said it was his favorite of all the movies he made and including biographic elements ; in fact, he worked in this area in 1934 during the height of the Great Depression. During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. Kazan directed four performers to Best Actress Oscars: Celeste Holm, Kim Hunter, Eva Marie Saint and ¨Jo Van Fleet¨. Greek-Turkish director Elia Kazan who being a child emigrated along with his family to United States made magnificent films . Some of them describe memories , emotions and infancy images , narrating the persecution to Greeks and Armenians by Turkish that finished in genocide as in ¨America , America¨ . Kazan directed a string of successful films as ¨Gentleman's agreement¨, ¨Man on a tightrope¨, ¨panic in the streets¨, ¨Pinky¨ , ¨Splendor in the grass¨, ¨Baby doll¨, ¨the engagement¨, ¨a Street named desire¨, ¨East of Eden¨ and especially ¨On the waterfront¨ his greatest hit .

Lee Remick's own favorite among her movies, and fine late Elia Kazan, this historic romance of the TVA and progress vs. tradition is beautifully crafted, gorgeous to look at, exquisitely acted, and quite frightening in its depiction of potential mob violence. Cleverly adapted from two books by Paul Osborn, it takes its time spinning out a gripping tale of a government agent (a restrained Montgomery Clift, his private life a wreck, but none of it shows on screen) trying to evict a stubborn, proud old woman (Jo Van Fleet, magnificent; Shirley Jones won over this? Really?) from her island so it can be flooded and power brought to all those poor Tennesseeans. He enlists the aid of her widowed-mom granddaughter, Remick, and the relationship between her and Clift is wonderfully ambiguous and rich. It's intelligent, moving, and convincing, and nobody went to see it in 1960. Very worth seeking out.

The DVD case with this release carries a comment describing the film as a 'hidden gem'. How often has that promise been fulfilled for buyers? In this case, for me, it definitely was. I like most of Elia Kazan's films, and 'Wild River' is an excellent example of his work.Kazan gets fine performances out of the whole cast. He tells the story without flourishes or cinematic indulgences, pacing the action and character development with wonderful skill and feeling. (A fine musical score contributes to the mood.) The film starts out with newsreel footage of flooding along the Tennessee River in the 1930s. The use of historical material is a simple and effective way of setting up the situation: the attempt by a Tennessee Valley Authority bureaucrat to persuade a woman landholder to move off the island she owns in the river, the last property not yet repossessed for a dam project. But Kazan's film is not of the 'cinema realism' type. It is a study in character: the bureaucrat who comes to do a job in the public interest, the old woman who refuses to surrender her birthright, and her widowed granddaughter who craves to rejoin society. The story takes these three characters through a convincing and interesting journey. There are no plot surprises, and yet the outcome is never obvious. Jo Van Fleet, as the woman hold-out, gives a powerful portrayal of someone soured in her rightness. Montgomery Clift, as the bureaucrat, is as good here as in any of his films. The reserved quality of his acting style is put to good use, in character terms, by Kazan. Lee Remick, as the granddaughter, demonstrates the emotional range and subtlety of performance that mark her best work. She is also strikingly beautiful. This film is a treasure.

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.