Buried Treasure: Wild River (1960)

Steve Erickson's novel Zeroville imagines its hero, a man named Vikar, as a kind of cinema savant. A modern-day holy fool fixated on old movies, Vikar passes, Zelig-fashion, through the Easy Riders, Raging Bull milieu of 1970s Hollywood while remaining largely oblivious to its historical significance. At the end of his improbable quest, this fictional character is given credit by his creator for the 1981 discovery of a real-life Holy Grail of filmmaking, 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, squirreled away in a Norwegian mental hospital’s broom closet. Director Carl Dreyer’s original cut had been destroyed soon after its release and for the next fifty-three years had been available only in a collection of outtakes. For anyone who loves movies, this is just one of the unnerving reminders of the medium’s vulnerability to all manner of ill-luck, including but not limited to the censor’s knife, the course of time, and, perhaps most terrifyingly, drawn-out litigation. A Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-like lawsuit laid up the 1973 occult classic The Holy Mountain for decades of courtroom wrangling between its director, self-styled shamanistic visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky, and his producer, the Beatles’ high-powered former manager Allen Klein. Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons remains an undiscovered cinematic grail, with its entire third act still unrecovered from whatever RKO editing-room floor it was left on.

At first glance, Wild River, a 1960 drama about FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority program, seems ill-suited to join the ranks of this lost legion of cinema. It stars two actors with devoted followings, Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, and was directed by the equally celebrated filmmaker Elia Kazan. The film’s shoot in and around Charleston, Tennessee in October and November 195, seems to have gone as smoothly as any major studio production, even unusually so for one dependent on the erratic Clift. The release was botched and didn’t make any money for the studio, Twentieth Century Fox, but then the same could be said for many films that do not, as Wild River did, go largely unseen for fifty years. In short, there’s no good reason for this movie to be unavailable on Region 1 DVD (there’s currently a disc out from an English company, but plenty of more casual classic-film watchers will probably not have the wherewithal to purchase and be able to watch it). Fortunately, the movie’s status seems now to be improving, with more frequent airings on Fox’s cable movie channel and the recent weeklong run of a restored 35mm print at New York’s Film Forum.

One reason that this is a film to be treasured is that it contains some of the best work of those who helped make it. In his film work, Elia Kazan sometimes struggled against habits he had picked up from his background in theater, such as wordiness and self-consciously “big” acting. There was good reason for this approach of course when the project was in fact derived from a stage play, as in his big-screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but even extraordinary films like A Face in the Crowd, On the Waterfront and East of Eden can be marred by that nagging sense of a proscenium arch hidden just above the frame. Wild River stands out in this body of work in part because we can sense its director trying more fully to exploit his medium’s visual qualities.

The scenario actually would probably have been well suited to one of Kazan’s stage productions: a conflict between two figures, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), an idealistic New Deal bureaucrat clearing the land to be flooded by a new dam, and Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), the elderly Southern matriarch he’s been assigned to buy off the small island she occupies midstream of the Tennessee River. Though her refusal to do so drives forward the story, the verbal confrontations that ensue between the two carry less weight than the landscape surrounding them. As Kazan told biographer Richard Schickel: “Here in this picture you have a brilliant opportunity to do everything very, very pictorially and very much without words…Just have a succession of meaningful events.”

Wild River’s lack of reliance on speech-making points to its mature attitude toward the story’s larger conflict, that between a rooted folk culture and government-directed liberalism. Kazan could empathize with both sides: he had been a high-minded idealist not unlike his hero in the 1930s, a member of the Communist Party and the New York-based radical Group Theater, but he also felt an affinity, according to Schickel, with the traditional mindset of rural Americans, which he found not unlike his own Anatolian Greek background. He’d originally conceived of the project in 1943, while dealing with Department of Agriculture bureaucrats in putting on the pro-rationing propaganda piece It’s Up to You. By the time camera rolled in 1959, Kazan had spent years working off and on the story. In the process he had come to see his hero as a version of his own younger self, cocksure about his ability to change the world, heedless about the damage he might cause to it. For a man whose youthful political dreams had ended in the very public disillusionment of the HUAC hearings, Wild River would be his chance to express some hard-earned wisdom.

If one function the film serves is as Elia Kazan’s personal testament, another is to record one of Montgomery Clift’s last, best performances, just six years before his death at the age of 46. When the actor came to the set, he could not turn in the performance Kazan had originally hoped for, that of an arrogant, “Best and the Brightest”-style technocrat. Clift was too fragile and damaged from years of battling depression and anxiety and feeding addictions to alcohol and drugs. The vulnerability his performances had always been known for came instead to shape the character, who is not a zealot but a man unwilling to defend his own philosophy to the point of disregarding other people. It also makes the contrast with Jo Van Fleet’s performance as Ella Garth, in all her unyielding obstinancy, all the greater.

Only in her fifties when she took on the role, Van Fleet flawlessly inhabits the skin and the speech of a woman who’s spend most of her eighty-some years on the same small patch of land in Tennessee. We don’t really like Ella Garth, especially when we see her lording it over the African-American sharecroppers who live on the island in conditions even more destitute than hers, but Van Fleet shows the strength and fortitude inside her prickly, unpleasant character. Compared to such a detailed, convincing performance, Clift never quite convinces as anyone other than “Montgomery Clift.” His tremulous, twitchy manner occasionally overwhelms the content of his scenes. Despite these waverings, his performance is impossible to look away from, and hard to imagine the film without.

In this sense, the real test of Clift and the film comes not when he’s butting heads with Jo Van Fleet, but in his love scenes with Lee Remick, as Ella’s granddaughter Carol. This dimension of the story is potentially its most hackneyed, since it threatens the familiar Hollywood ploy of reducing thorny political quandaries to the problems of two beautiful people in love. Remick’s piercing blue eyes leave no doubt why Clift, or anyone else, might fall in love with her, but her performance reminds us of the real gaps, in experience and class, that lie between their characters. The two have real- to use a lazy word- “chemistry” in their scenes together, though Clift’s fragile state at the time of shooting meant that playing a Kennedy-era-style dominating male was not an option. In his autobiography, A Life, Kazan relates “In one scene Monty, at the instant of arousal, slumped to the floor. I cursed him under my breath as a limp lover, but then I decided to play the scene as it happened…” For her part, Remick commented that “his character had been written as a far more obviously masculine man, he was incapable of being the dominant partner in a male-female relationship.” The result may not have been what audiences expected to see in 1960, but it carries its own, very present erotic charge, as in the scene that Clift and Remick share in the front of her car, her two small children sleeping in the back seat. It’s an extraordinary “sex” scene, with nary an explicit detail.

Kazan’s ability to get superlative performances out of Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet is laudable but not surprising for a man who had ushered Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays into the world; what was new was the quiet assurance with which he sketched in the environment around his actors. As much as their performances, what an audience takes away from Wild River is a sense of the Southern small-town world it creates, expressed in small careful details like the raft with which Chuck gets himself across to Ella’s island. Kazan and cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks evoke a sense that this world will soon vanish with autumnal colors, in Remick’s auburn hair and in the amber-fringed surrounding woods.

Films like A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, and On the Waterfront sometimes channel a sense of hysteria, of overheated emotions bursting from the characters’ repressed psyches or of uncontrollable forces surging to the forefront of American public life. Wild River almost but doesn’t quite go in the same direction with a subplot about Chuck standing up to bigots in the town over his use of a racially integrated workforce. It seems to be turning into a liberal suspense film along the lines of Bad Day in Black Rock, pitting a lone progressive hero against a reactionary mob, but then defuses any sense of melodrama in a siege sequence that turns from terror to absurd comedy (it doesn’t hurt to have Bruce Dern, in his first onscreen role, as one of the racist bullies). In the same vein, Kazan allows Carol’s defiance of Chuck to fade out, rather than blow up, suggesting that his characters are experiencing more than enacting the changes around them. The occasional staginess of Kazan’s direction, which turns On the Waterfront’s Hoboken dockworkers into Soviet agitprop friezes, fits this story’s sense of people stuck in place, waiting for history to happen to them. Like countless movies before and after it, Wild River suggests that the modern world inevitably triumphs over the old; unlike most of them, it doesn’t pick sides.