Synopsis
Wild River (1960) is an Elia Kazan drama you can watch online on iFILM. Chuck Glover, a young Tennessee Valley Authority official, arrives in a backwater town with a thankless task: clear the families off land that a new dam is about to flood.
His biggest obstacle is Ella Garth, a stubborn octogenarian who runs a farm on a river island and won't sell a single acre, even as the water climbs toward her door. The townspeople resent the outsider, especially once he pays Black laborers the same wage as everyone else. Then Glover falls for Ella's widowed granddaughter, and duty tangles hard with desire. Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet anchor a story about three people stranded on opposite sides of change.
One of Kazan's quietest and most overlooked films, it weighs the human cost of progress against the common good and refuses the easy side. Watch for a young Bruce Dern in an early role; the picture was later restored by the Academy Film Archive. Stream Wild River (1960) online on iFILM.
Starring
Recommendations
Comments 0