Wild River

Wild River (1960)

The Wild Language... The Wild Hungers... The Wild Furies!

A young bureaucrat for the Tennessee Valley Authority goes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam. He encounters opposition from the local people, in particular a farmer who objects to his employment (with pay) of local black laborers. Much of the plot revolves around the eviction of a stubborn octogenarian from her home on an island in the river, and the young man's love affair with that woman's widowed granddaughter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation.

Date of release
1960-05-26
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (108)
Runtime
1h 50m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Elia Kazan

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Dunbar's Cove and Mud on the Stars
  • Filmed in: Charleston, Cleveland, Hiwassee River, and Chickamauga Lake
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films

Wild River is a 1960 American drama film directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, and Jo Van Fleet. It was filmed in the Tennessee Valley, and was adapted by Paul Osborn from two novels: Borden Deal's Dunbar's Cove and William Bradford Huie's Mud on the Stars, drawing for plot from Deal's story of a battle of wills between the nascent Tennessee Valley Authority and generations-old land owners, and from Huie's study of a rural Southern matriarchal family for characters and their reaction to destruction of their land, and the controversial employment methods of African-American laborers by the TVA. It marked Bruce Dern's film debut.

Production

A script was written by Ben Maddow but he refused credit because none of it was used in the final film.

Coon Denton Island on the Hiwassee River, in northern Bradley County, Tennessee, upriver from Charleston, served as the fictional Garth Island, and the city of Charleston's old business district served as the fictional city of Garthville. A peninsula northwest of Cleveland, Tennessee, on Chickamauga Lake, was used, and a studio for interior shooting was created in the Cleveland armory.

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

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