“Probably Elia Kazan’s finest and deepest film, a meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present.”
Eager to further his career, ambitious Tennessee Valley Authority administrator Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) journeys to a small town to oversee the clearing of the valley in preparation for the construction of a new dam. As Glover attempts to win over the town's stubborn matriarch, 80-year-old Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), who refuses to leave, he falls in love with her granddaughter, Carol Garth Baldwin (Lee Remick).
While perhaps less well known than some of Kazan's other films, Wild River is regarded as one of the crowning achievements in the career of both Kazan and lead actor Montgomery Clift; and charted new territory for cinema at the dawn of the 1960s, combining combining psychology, eroticism, documentary realism, and exquisite pictorial beauty within the CinemaScope frame.
