The River (Oriental-International; United Artists] is a thoroughly unconventional movie and a very good one. It rises out of Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel (1946) about an English girl growing up beside a holy river in India. Directed by France's Jean (Grand Illusion) Renoir, who wrote the script with Novelist Godden, and produced entirely in India by a Hollywood florist named Kenneth McEldowney, it is a sensitive, Technicolored record of youthful growing pains, enriched by a poetic perspective of life and a wealth of Indian sights & sounds.
One measure of the film's quality...