A hidden gem among Elia Kazan films, an elegiac beauty on the price of progress as 1930s New Deal programs, in the person of TVA agent Montgomery Clift, bring social & cultural change taming the ‘wild’ Tennessee River with dams for Hydro-Electric Power and flood control. Paul Osborn’s superb script, working largely thru indirection, boils the conflict down to a single land-owning holdout, a stubborn old woman (Jo Van Fleet) surrounded by her layabout family & the small black community who actually work the fields. Isolated on a small spit of land in the middle of the river, Clift can’t risk forcing her off and losing political support, but he also can’t alter the timetable of dams and rising waters. Racial tensions, Jim Crow customs, Southern manners (good & bad), and a beautifully observed hesitant romance between Lee Remick, a young widow with two kids, Clift, and the gentle suitor she’s never loved but promised to marry are perfectly integrated into the broader story. Yet it’s one of the few Kazan pics where nothing feels dramatically forced. With glorious cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks (CinemaScope/Deluxe Color), its attractive tight grain slightly over-processed on DVD, bringing autumnal warmth to match the growing relationship between the two leads*, and a fine, spare score from Kenyon Hopkins. Kazan made many louder films, but none better.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Remick reportedly found Clift distant, even unresponsive on set. But oh, the results! What an extraordinary actor he was. The tone of voice he finds to tell her ‘No,’ the kindly man she likes will never become a man she loves. Or the open manner she must have searched and searched for, with Kazan, to initially halt Clift’s interest, and later, force a reaction. And so lovely on screen, she never got the credit she deserved.
DOUBLE-BILL: Osborn’s other script for Kazan, EAST OF EDEN/’55.
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