Watching the River flow

The title is something of a misnomer, because Wild River (1960), Elia Kazan’s film about the Tennessee Valley Authority’s attempts to vacate landowners from a soon-to-be-inundated region during the Depression, is in fact a remarkably gentle, unhurried picture, one more about finding the tools to accept inevitable change than fighting the odds, one more about human behaviour and fading ways of living than high drama. A significant element in this gentleness in Montgomery Clift, who wasn’t Kazan’s first choice for the role of TVA administrator Chuck Glover, the man charged with convincing a formidable octogenarian matriarch named Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet) to surrender ownership of an island in the middle of the Tennessee River that’s been in her family for generations. Kazan might have imagined Glover a smooth-talking avatar of progress with no special feeling for the unreasonable convictions of aging hillbillies, but what he got from Clift was something much richer, a performance of great compassion and melancholic admiration. Clift helps elevate this film to an elegy, and, along with his equally gracious co-star, Lee Remick, he also manages to make Wild River’s love story seem as natural as it is seemingly unlikely. This is a very special film, gorgeously crafted, socially poignant, brimming with detail of place and period, a lesser-known highlight in Kazan’s career. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from 20^th Century Fox.

Wild River opens with devastating documentary footage of houses collapsing into rising waters and a man struggling to itemize the loss of his family members to the disastrous flooding that was common before the government began construction on the dam project that would simultaneously uproot an entire region and bring safety and electricity to its people. The image then shifts from black and white to colour, and we see Glover surveying this same valley seen in the documentary footage from the window of a small plane. He occupies a local office, praises the “rugged individualism” of the now notorious last hold-out Garth, and soon sets out to visit her island, upon which a sign reading TVA KEEP OFF has been posted right by the edge of the water—water which Glover will be tossed into by one of Garth’s more impulsive middle-aged boys. That first visit to Garth’s island will also mark Glover’s first encounter with Garth’s granddaughter Carol (Remick), a 19-year-old widow and mother of two. Carol is pretty, sharp, honest, and perhaps the only person who can convince the old lady to accept the federal government’s offer and make way for the flood. What draws Carol to Glover is not mysterious: she’s lonely and desperate, and he actually talks with her, with kindness and interest, and he represents a second chance at a life barely started. What draws Glover to Carol? Other than her youth, energy and loveliness? Perhaps she can be for him a souvenir, something precious to hold onto from the world that his employers are about to destroy in the name of progress.

Wild River doesn’t pick sides. That isn't the point at all. Both parties are right, but only one is doomed. From the start everyone tells Glover that there’s no way he’ll ever get Ella Garth off that island without force, and in the end it turns out to be true. All she needs is a little force, a little push—she doesn’t have the heart to move otherwise. But how does this film get from that starting stalemate to its final resolution? The answer is lovingly complicated, and needs to be seen to be understood. 

           

I cover the Waterfront

From that startling first image of handful of men exiting a shack, dwarfed by a colossal ship, to the final bloodied Christ-like stumble of the unlikely hero toward the man in the coat hollering everyone to work, there is in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) a steady pulse of the extraordinary. We’re not watching a merely great movie but a transformative one, and that transformation, so layered, complex and electric, is something I believe viewers can sense even without a deep knowledge of film history. This is high drama and gritty realism, a moral tale mired in moral ambiguity. It went aggressively against the aesthetic, commercial and ideological grain of its times—and still won eight Oscars, including Best Picture.

Criterion’s new edition of On the Waterfront is among their most heavily supplemented releases—with good reason. Even after his death, Kazan remains contentious on every front, one of Hollywood’s enduring enigmas: his immigrant background and roots in the Group Theatre; his co-founding of the Actor’s Studio and his ushering of a new wave of actors into the movies; his cooperation with the House Committee of Un-American Activities that destroyed so many careers during the peak of the Red Scare. The film, which concerns a dockworker who testifies against a corrupt union boss, has often been read by many as a defense of Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s naming names to HUAC. Among Criterion’s most interesting supplements is the documentary Elia Kazan: An Outsider (1982), shot by the great Québécois cinematographer Michel Brault, in which, decades after the HUAC hearings, Kazan still seems over-eager to justify his actions through a complicated set of circumstantial explanations. In another excellent supplement, produced by Criterion, the critic David Thomson offers his own compelling explanation for Kazan’s choice to name names, even when he knew it would make him an object of considerable scorn in the industry for the rest of his life: “I think that it really came out of a psychological need to be an outsider.” (This same documentary features commentary from scholar Lisa Dombrowski, a welcome addition to Criterion's pantheon of critics. She wrote an excellent book on Sam Fuller a few years back that I can't recommend enough.) 

The film’s outsider is, of course, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a disgraced ex-boxer, now dockworker, who begins the story as the darling of Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) the lethal union leader with mob ties, and ends it as Friendly’s enemy. On the Waterfront has a dizzying number of wonderful performances, but those of Brando and Cobb make for the strongest contrast because they’re both so damned good, yet so different. Cobb, at times genuinely fearsome, eating with his mouth open, eyes darting around a room as he lectures Terry, gives a gutsy, gorgeous performance, but he’s also a bulldozer, shouting his way through key moments.

Brando meanwhile is a fountain of nuance, seemingly hyper-masculine yet so vulnerable, even effeminate in his tenderness—along with Monty Clift and James Dean, his stardom would instigate an attack on Hollywood gender stereotypes from the male perspective. (And Jesus is he ever handsome here.) In that early scene where Terry realizes he set up a fellow dockworker for murder, he seems caught off guard by his own guilt, absently clutches at himself as though in response to acid reflex. Later he’ll chew gum as a way of transmitting thought. He’s comical, yet touchingly earnest in his scenes with Eva Marie Saint—which are to me the best scenes in the movie—shoving his paw in her little white glove, saying lines like “I don’t like the country, the crickets make me nervous.” Brando does some shouting as well, but behind the shouting there is an almost palpable net of impulse, a psychological busyness, none of it decoration. Brando is a revelation here, and his approach brought out the best in his co-stars, Saint most of all, who is the picture of innocence, yet also feisty, yet also uncertain, yet also fascinated with Brando with a nascent eroticism that rises to the surface in unexpected ways. Crazy to think that this is the same actress who just a few years later would be the sophisticated, sexy Hitchcock blonde in North By Northwest (1959). 

What else? Boris Kaufman’s bleak and sumptuous cinematography, Leonard Bernstein’s intrusive yet stunningly beautiful score—a way of telling the story all on its own. I love Bernstein's score, but half wish I could take it out of the movie and just hear the sounds of Hoboken and water, and wintry gasped breaths. But I'll draw this to a close. Just take my word for it: Criterion has given us the best possible home video experience of On the Waterfront, a singular masterpiece from Hollywood’s great transitional decade—and it rewards investigation into who made it, how it works, and how it came to be.