Wild River

Wild River (1960), directed by Elia Kazan, offers conflicting schizophrenic perspectives. Set in the early 1930s, the movie begins as if it is a documentary, with images of raging floodwaters and a close-up testimonial by a young father about how his father-in-law and three young children drowned in a flood. A voiceover explains that to quell the floodwaters Congress in 1933 passed legislation to create the Tennessee Valley Authority. By constructing a series of dams, the TVA would control floods and save human lives. (The generation of electric power is never mentioned). The TVA would purchase property of people living on the river and they would be relocated. Some people, the voice suggests, would refuse to move voluntarily.

The TVA is presented as a modern and progressive force, a positive development that would bring American individualism into conflict with the federal government. But individualism is only part of the issue. The Garth family lives on an island that the rising impoundment waters will inundate. The eighty-year-old matriarch Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet) is the individual who refuses to move or be moved. Through the visual imagery of the island the film expands the concern with individualism to encompass lifestyle, culture, and history. Old farm buildings, a weathering but rugged old farm house, corn fields, human figures that dart in and out of the corn rows, industrious black workers—this is a glimpse into another world and another life, a world that is part of the American world but that is cut off from the mainstream. To Ella Garth and her family the TVA is the enemy.

The film does not take a stand on this conflict between Ella Garth and progress. Progress must happen, it argues, because progress offers benefits and a safer life to the people who live along the river. The lives that are displaced or simply erased, it also argues, are a sad and inevitable consequence of progress.

Other films and literary works have taken a similar approach to the same conflict, but with more empathy for the displaced. This film is so neutral that it lacks power. This lack of vigor is mirrored in the strange relationship that develops between Ella Garth’s granddaughter Carol (Lee Remick) and the TVA agent Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), who has been sent to convince the old woman to move. Chuck speaks and moves with the realism of a robot. Carol is beautiful and genuine and wistful and equally lifeless. At the end of the film, Chuck is watching as final preparations are made to raze Ella’s house. Carol approaches him to report that Ella has died. She delivers the news, and he receives it, with the kind of interest one would evince at the news that an aspirin bottle is empty.

Chuck is passive both physically and morally. He becomes increasingly concerned about Ella’s situation and goes out of his way to find another house for her to live in, but he never relents in his efforts to move her. He seems attracted to Carol but is strangely reticent when she declares her feelings for him. She tells him that she loves him and that she wants to leave with him and all he can do is reply that “I don’t know what to say.” When threatened, he often backs off. Only when a gang of town drunks beat them up does he propose marriage. He seems to relish being beaten. It’s as if it takes pain and humiliation to arouse him. Why does Carol love him?

The union of Carol and Chuck is the film’s statement about the relationship of progress and tradition. They unite harmoniously and tradition vanishes. This love plot is a disjunctive counterpoint to the plight of Ella Garth. These two lines of narrative don’t ever fit neatly together, but they do make for an interesting if unsettled film.

The relationship between Carol and Chuck does allow Elia Kazan to direct several intense scenes that remind us of his best films. Ironically, Kazan’s film portrays the consequences of Ella Garth's stubborn resistance against progress as a tragedy, but a tragedy viewed with casual interest rather than with genuine emotional apprehension.