Wild River (PG.)
1960. Directed by Elia Kazan.
Starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, Albert Salmi and J.C.Flippen. 110 mins. Released by Eureka as part of their Masters of Cinema series.
Wild River features two Hollywood stars who have inspired rock songs by esteemed bands. Clift is the subject of The Clash song The Right Profile: sample lyric, “New York, New York, 42nd Street/ Hustlers rustle, pimps pimp the beat/ Monty Clift is recognised at dawn/Aint got no shoes and his shirt is torn.” Australia's The Go-Betweens penned an ode to its female lead titled Lee Remick, sample lyric, “She was in The Omen with Gregory Peck/ She got killed but what the heck …... I, I, I, I, I, love Lee Remick, she's a darling.” Clift got the better song and he's the main draw in this beguiling oddity from the director of A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront.
Clift was the photo on Laura Dern's bedroom wall in Blue Velvet but this phenomenal performer, one of the most mesmerizing screen performers ever, has been largely footnoted. Brando got the glory, Dean got the martyrdom, Clift got a side order of both. Halfway through his career a horrendous car crash nearly killed him, left his face partially paralyzed and for the last decade of his life (he died in 1966 aged 45) he was addicted to alcohol and prescription pain killers.
Mostly though his career suffered through poor choice of roles. John Travolta is famous for his ability to turn down hits but at least he eventually got round to doing Pulp Fiction. Clift invariably shunned the thoroughbred and opted for a donkey. Even when he did get a hit role he never got a catchphrase like Brando, no I coulda bin a contender or Stellaaaar. His most famous roles were A Place In The Sun, and From Here To Eternity, two classics that, for me, haven't really survived the journey down the decades.
There are a few gems in his filmography. Judgment At Nuremberg is worth ploughing through just for his ten minute role as a witness who had been sterilized by the Nazis. And he'll always have his Two Rivers. His first film Red River was a Howard Hawks western about an epic cattle drive in which he and John Wayne indulged in an outrageous mincing competition in seemingly the most straightforward macho environment imaginable.
(I'm not impugning The Duke's sexuality – but he sure did walk funny. It is remarkable how Hollywood saw a delicate flower like Clift as a natural for westerns: he turned down Shame, Rio Bravo and High Noon.)
And then there is this glorious, gorgeous curio from Elia Kazan. Set during Roosevelt's New Deal, when the government was trying to bump start the economy after The Great Depression through job creation and infrastructure. An enormous dam has been built to tame the Tennessee river whose wild floods regularly claim lives. The dam is due to be closed but in the valley that will be flooded one old woman (Van Fleet) has refused to sell up. Clift plays an employee of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sent there to persuade her to leave, who falls in love with her daughter (Remick) and stirs up local redneck resentment by paying the “kneegrows” the same rates as the whites.
Wild River is an inherent matinee of a film. I can't imagine it being seen at any time of day other than an afternoon, preferably curled up on a sofa. It is basically a soppy, old school, seen-a-thousand-times-before melodrama, onto which any number of distractions and additions have been attached. It lurches in three or four different and conflicting directions.
Politically the film is even more potent today as it dramatizes the basic faultline at the heart of American society – a fierce mistrust of any kind of government interference so virulent that it seems at times that any kind of progress has to be protested against almost as a matter of principle. What is remarkable about Wild River is that this attitude almost wins out. Clift is clearly our liberal hero, but as he swans around the place in his three piece suit and his TVA marked car, rather piously showing the locals the errors of their ways while stealing their women folk, you can understand why they resent him. It's like a progressives mea culpa: we're right but that doesn't always excuse the hurt that is caused in the process.
Shot in Cinemascope the film looks tremendous. Colour was simply better back in those days. It looks like a downbeat, neo-realist Gone With The Wind. Everything is so lifelike and yet so much more. I always think of Kazan as a theatre bloke paid to point cameras at Methodists but this is a real, vibrant piece of film-making.
It's not the neatest piece though. The tone shifts all over the place. One minute documentary realism, the other heated melodrama, but there's a casualness to it. When Remick makes her big speech to Clift, begging him to stay, there is a fly buzzing around in the frame, which both distracts from and heightens the emotions of the scene. Throughout a sense of menace is built up around the hotheaded figure of Bailey, but whenever it explodes moments later the event is laughed off.
And at the centre of it all is Clift. So what's he like? Hugely watchable if as erratic as the film itself. Generally he gets lumped in as one of the Method boys and he did his time at the Actors Studio and was as conscientious as any of them but he didn't have the twitchy, showy energy of Brando or Dean because he didn't need it. He was so effortlessly charismatic and charming that he could've waltzed through a leading man career without ever taking a lesson. Like Gary Cooper, he really didn't need to do anything, but the method training meant he felt compelled to try. Which is a daunting combination – traditional Hollywood leading man with all the method tricks. The only thing that could defeat him was himself.
1960. Directed by Elia Kazan.
Starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, Albert Salmi and J.C.Flippen. 110 mins. Released by Eureka as part of their Masters of Cinema series.
Wild River features two Hollywood stars who have inspired rock songs by esteemed bands. Clift is the subject of The Clash song The Right Profile: sample lyric, “New York, New York, 42nd Street/ Hustlers rustle, pimps pimp the beat/ Monty Clift is recognised at dawn/Aint got no shoes and his shirt is torn.” Australia's The Go-Betweens penned an ode to its female lead titled Lee Remick, sample lyric, “She was in The Omen with Gregory Peck/ She got killed but what the heck …... I, I, I, I, I, love Lee Remick, she's a darling.” Clift got the better song and he's the main draw in this beguiling oddity from the director of A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront.
Clift was the photo on Laura Dern's bedroom wall in Blue Velvet but this phenomenal performer, one of the most mesmerizing screen performers ever, has been largely footnoted. Brando got the glory, Dean got the martyrdom, Clift got a side order of both. Halfway through his career a horrendous car crash nearly killed him, left his face partially paralyzed and for the last decade of his life (he died in 1966 aged 45) he was addicted to alcohol and prescription pain killers.
Mostly though his career suffered through poor choice of roles. John Travolta is famous for his ability to turn down hits but at least he eventually got round to doing Pulp Fiction. Clift invariably shunned the thoroughbred and opted for a donkey. Even when he did get a hit role he never got a catchphrase like Brando, no I coulda bin a contender or Stellaaaar. His most famous roles were A Place In The Sun, and From Here To Eternity, two classics that, for me, haven't really survived the journey down the decades.
There are a few gems in his filmography. Judgment At Nuremberg is worth ploughing through just for his ten minute role as a witness who had been sterilized by the Nazis. And he'll always have his Two Rivers. His first film Red River was a Howard Hawks western about an epic cattle drive in which he and John Wayne indulged in an outrageous mincing competition in seemingly the most straightforward macho environment imaginable.
(I'm not impugning The Duke's sexuality – but he sure did walk funny. It is remarkable how Hollywood saw a delicate flower like Clift as a natural for westerns: he turned down Shame, Rio Bravo and High Noon.)
And then there is this glorious, gorgeous curio from Elia Kazan. Set during Roosevelt's New Deal, when the government was trying to bump start the economy after The Great Depression through job creation and infrastructure. An enormous dam has been built to tame the Tennessee river whose wild floods regularly claim lives. The dam is due to be closed but in the valley that will be flooded one old woman (Van Fleet) has refused to sell up. Clift plays an employee of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sent there to persuade her to leave, who falls in love with her daughter (Remick) and stirs up local redneck resentment by paying the “kneegrows” the same rates as the whites.
Wild River is an inherent matinee of a film. I can't imagine it being seen at any time of day other than an afternoon, preferably curled up on a sofa. It is basically a soppy, old school, seen-a-thousand-times-before melodrama, onto which any number of distractions and additions have been attached. It lurches in three or four different and conflicting directions.
Politically the film is even more potent today as it dramatizes the basic faultline at the heart of American society – a fierce mistrust of any kind of government interference so virulent that it seems at times that any kind of progress has to be protested against almost as a matter of principle. What is remarkable about Wild River is that this attitude almost wins out. Clift is clearly our liberal hero, but as he swans around the place in his three piece suit and his TVA marked car, rather piously showing the locals the errors of their ways while stealing their women folk, you can understand why they resent him. It's like a progressives mea culpa: we're right but that doesn't always excuse the hurt that is caused in the process.
Shot in Cinemascope the film looks tremendous. Colour was simply better back in those days. It looks like a downbeat, neo-realist Gone With The Wind. Everything is so lifelike and yet so much more. I always think of Kazan as a theatre bloke paid to point cameras at Methodists but this is a real, vibrant piece of film-making.
It's not the neatest piece though. The tone shifts all over the place. One minute documentary realism, the other heated melodrama, but there's a casualness to it. When Remick makes her big speech to Clift, begging him to stay, there is a fly buzzing around in the frame, which both distracts from and heightens the emotions of the scene. Throughout a sense of menace is built up around the hotheaded figure of Bailey, but whenever it explodes moments later the event is laughed off.
And at the centre of it all is Clift. So what's he like? Hugely watchable if as erratic as the film itself. Generally he gets lumped in as one of the Method boys and he did his time at the Actors Studio and was as conscientious as any of them but he didn't have the twitchy, showy energy of Brando or Dean because he didn't need it. He was so effortlessly charismatic and charming that he could've waltzed through a leading man career without ever taking a lesson. Like Gary Cooper, he really didn't need to do anything, but the method training meant he felt compelled to try. Which is a daunting combination – traditional Hollywood leading man with all the method tricks. The only thing that could defeat him was himself.