Wild River

Elia Kazan's Wild River, considered by many critics to be his greatest film, is playing for one week at Film Forum in a beautiful new CinemaScope print. The performances of Lee Remick and Montgomery Clift are among the finest and most moving I've ever seen in a Hollywood film. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it “The most complex and finely detailed love story in Kazan’s work…a fusion of long scenes with a broad vision that creates the director’s achieved masterpiece.” Clift, an employee of the New Deal-sponsored Tennessee Valley Authority, has the challenge of forcing Remick's grandmother (Jo Van Fleet) to leave the small island property on the Tennessee River that has been her lifelong home. Through his developing love for Remick, he comes to appreciate and sympathize with Grandma's position, although he has no choice but to clear the island (and hasten the old woman's death) to make way for the inevitable flooding caused by the nearby dam. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict between "progress" and tradition is at the heart of the film, and the back-and-forth dynamic of the Clift-Remick relationship becomes incredibly moving as Remick alternates between trying to resist her attraction to Clift and trying to get past his stoic facade and make him admit his love for her. Scenes of Remick singing a hymn as she rides the ferry to the island, or returning to the home where she lived with her late husband, are radiantly shot and powerfully performed, perhaps the richest in a film full of beautifully realized scenes. Just as the success of Clift's assignment means displacing Van Fleet from her home, the success of his relationship with Remick requires displacing her from her home and disrupting his own isolation. The final image, as Clift and Remick are flying back to their new life together in Washington, is an iris-in to an overhead shot of the all-important dam reduced to insignificance in a corner of the wide screen.