Part of Milestones of the Last Quarter Century and Weekend Classics
As the Aughts gave way to the 2010s, smaller more director or actor-centered repertory series — mostly with the frame of our ongoing Weekend Classics program — gave way to the mega-series, larger-scale film programs consisting of titles in the dozens. The first was Visions of the South, which spanned four weeks in the spring of 2011, and billed itself as: “A survey of 20th century film depicting life in the southeastern United States from the inside and out.” Beyond D.W. Griffith, Harper Lee and Scarlett O’Hara, the series brings together 22 films spanning 75 years shot in, around and about the region.” In hindsight and with exactly 15 years removed, there are a few things we might’ve done differently but overall…pretty darn good.
The series opened with WILD RIVER — newly restored at the time by 20th Century Fox — in a beautiful 35mm print that’s since fallen into relative disrepair (we’re told). Not to worry — the forces behind the digitizing of the Fox library did not forget WILD RIVER. Set in the post-Depression Tennessee Valley and shot northeast of Chattanooga in rural Bradley County, famed director Elia Kazan’s WILD RIVER concerns an idealistic young TVA administrator (Montgomery Clift) sent to clear land to be flooded by a new dam on the Tennessee River. First, however, he must deal with the locals, an aging matriarch (Jo Van Fleet) who refuses to sell her land, and a gnawing attraction to her granddaughter (Lee Remick).
Kazan spent 25 years developing WILD RIVER — considered to be among his best — but was vocal in his displeasure with Fox’s lack of distribution and unsuccessfully attempted to buy it back. The film languished in the archives — and (truth be told) in comparison to household Kazan titles like A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and ON THE WATERFRONT — remains relatively unknown to this day.
Elia Kazan’s masterful recreation of a unique period in Tennessee history is the first major studio film shot in its entirety in Tennessee. Belcourt education and engagement director Allison Inman, a few months shy of joining the Belcourt team in 2011, hosted the opening night Q&A for WILD RIVER. The conversation featured Judy Harris Spurgeon, a native of Cleveland, Tennessee, who was cast at age seven as Lee Remick’s daughter, Barbara Ann Baldwin in WILD RIVER. At the time, Inman had just completed a one-hour documentary about the making of Kazan’s film and the production’s impact on the local people who brought the film to life.
Elia Kazan’s masterful recreation of a unique period in Tennessee history and is the first major studio film shot in its entirety in Tennessee.
“I honestly don’t know the last time I saw a film I loved as much as I love WILD RIVER. It’s easily the best Kazan film I’ve seen, one of the best of an exemplary year in cinema…and just a gorgeous fusion of the intellect, the heart, the soul, and the body.” —Scott Nye, Criterion Cast “Probably Elia Kazan’s finest and deepest film, a meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present.” —Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader “WILD RIVER is an important motion picture…. That rare element of tragedy, in the truly classical sense of the word, where an indomitable individual eventually must fall helpless prey to an irresistible, but impersonal edict designed for universal good.” —Variety (Dec 31, 1959)
