River Lady

River Lady (1948)

Gambling mistress of the untamed Mississippi where men are as good as their fists and women as good as their kisses!

In the 1850s, in a logging town on the Mississippi River, a conflict between the people of a mill town and the lumberjacks who work downriver. Romance and deceit are catalyzed by the arrival of the gambling river boat, River Lady, owned by the beautiful Sequin. Bauvais, a representative of the local lumber syndicate and Sequin's business partner, is trying to convince H.L. Morrison, the mill owner, to sell his business.

Date of release
1948-05-20
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 18m
Genres
Action, Drama, Western
Director
George Sherman

Casting

Interesting facts

River Lady is a 1948 American lumberjack Western film directed by George Sherman and starring Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea. It was filmed on the Universal Studios Backlot.

Production

The film was based on the novel by Houston Branch and Frank Waters. The novel was published in 1942, the New York Times calling it a "first rate story with no apparent marks of collaboration on it."

Film rights were bought by Universal in March 1941 for a reported $50,000 plus 10 cents for every copy sold over 70,000. The sale was done even before the novel had been written, simply on the strength of its synopsis. The rights were purchased for the Frank Lloyd production unit at Universal, and the film was not able to be made until three months after publication of the novel. Lloyd wanted to make it with Loretta Young.

When Lloyd left the studio, Universal kept rights to the novel. In 1946 the project was re-activated when it was assigned to producing-writing team of Michael Fessier and Ernest Pagano. They said the stars would be Yvonne De Carlo and Rod Cameron, who had just appeared in Fessier-Pagano's Frontier Gal (1945).

The Hollywood Reporter reported that Ann Blyth was originally cast in River Lady, probably as "Stephanie Morrison", Helena Carter's character. De Carlo and Duryea had previously appeared together in the Universal film Black Bart, also directed by Sherman.

According to Universal press materials, the boat used in River Lady was originally built in 1929 for the silent version of Show Boat.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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