CRITIC'S PICK!
“UNJUSTLY NEGLECTED! GORGEOUS... Lee Remick is Kazan's ace-in-the-hole.
Finally given a role that calls for sexuality and chops, she delivers wildly on both fronts.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York
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“STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL! The movie couldn’t have greater present-tense resonance.”
– David Denby, The New Yorker
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“LYRICAL AND QUIETLY TURBULENT, Wild River [is] the most complex and confessional of Kazan's movies.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
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“A MASTERPIECE!”
– Andrew Schencker, The L Magazine
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“A meditation on how the past both inhibits and enriches the present…
The tone shifts from hysteria to reverie in the blinking of an eye, but Kazan handles it all with a sure touch.”
– Dave Kehr

“One of Kazan’s most affecting films. Partly that’s because the battle lines — between city and country, old and new, expediency and commitment — are effectively blurred, making the conflict more dramatically complex than one might expect; but Kazan’s evident nostalgia for the 30s setting also lends the film greater depth and scope than is usually to be found in his work.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

“The most complex and finely detailed love story in Kazan’s work…
a fusion of long scenes with a broad vision that creates the director’s achieved masterpiece.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

(1960) In the wake of disastrous Depression era floods, the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is instituted, and Montgomery Clift flies in from D.C. to tie up one last loose end: get 80-year-old matriarch Jo Van Fleet to vacate her island homestead before the dams flood it. But she isn’t going, and as they argue Clift comes to appreciate her deep love for the land, and to find a bond growing with her widowed granddaughter, Lee Remick. A project Kazan nursed for 25 years, after his first visits to the region in the 30s, and the most atmospheric of his works, from its long, slow, almost Ozu-like opening scenes, through Ellsworth Fredericks’ crisply autumnal CinemaScope photography, Kenyon Hopkins’ haunting score — complemented by overheard snatches of hymns and spirituals, most memorably when a seeming no-neck begins a heartbreaking “In the pines” at a funeral on a cemetery-sized islet in the swollen river. And keyed by three powerful performances: Clift, never so sharp and subtle, a tentative smile, a flick of the eye, a nod conveying the shy city intellectual with an awakening heart and a hidden vein of iron; Van Fleet, only 37 at the time — her makeup took four hours — even stronger and more dominating than in her East of Eden Oscar-winner; and Remick, moving through loneliness, yearning, passion, and rage to create the most complete and developed among all of Kazan’s characters. Poorly distributed on first release, and long unavailable, this now can be seen as one of the greatest works of one of America’s greatest directors.
A CRITERION PICTURES RELEASE OF A TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM