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Wild River (20th Century-Fox). The story of the Tennessee Valley Authority is an epic in search of a poet. It has not found him in Elia Kazan, who produced and directed this picture, but it has found at least a man who can experience the elemental tensions of the tale—public against private interest, mule-team against machine society—and can extricate them from a script that smells less of the river than it does of the paste pot.
The film in fact is a crude pastiche of two novels: Scriptwriter Paul Osborn has lifted some characters and incidents from William Bradford Huie's Mud on the Stars, but much of his plot is taken from Borden Deal's Dunbar's Cove. As finally assembled, the picture tells the story of a young TVAgent (Montgomery Clift) who is ordered to turn an 80-year-old woman (Jo Van Fleet) off her land so that a big new dam can be closed, the area flooded, and a waterpower project set in motion. She refuses to budge. "I don't sell my land," she croaks fiercely, "my land that I poured my heart's blood into."
The agent tries to explain that a few individuals must suffer so that the whole region may gain: flood control, better crops, new industries, more jobs. "You don't love the land," he protests. "You love your land." She sends him packing with a proud but pathetic declaration of the frontier's faith: "I like things runnin' wild. I'm agin dams of any kind. And I ain't crawlin' to any guvmint." Evicted, she dies of a broken heart, and a new generation buries the old.
This is the mainstream of the story, and the script should have followed it through the film. Instead, it wanders aimlessly into backwaters of violence, sex, segregation and even antiSemitism. The sex develops into a love affair that, as these things go in Hollywood productions, is unusually fierce and sweet and natural. But the rough stuff is merely conventional, and the race question, in the last analysis, is begged. Kazan's direction, however, is firm—most of the leading players give creditable performances, and Lee Remick, as the back-country belle the hero falls for, is singularly touching. Most impressive of all is the wise and gentle moderation of the film's philosophy. Kazan comes down firmly on the side of eminent domain and the com monweal, but also takes time to recognize, with a kind of puzzled honesty, that what is good for the greatest number is often bad for the soul.