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Wild River
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The General Heading of Progress
Want to take
three sides
Want to take
two
Afraid to take
one side
Afraid to be
true
– Natalie Farr, “Wild Rivers”, from In
Your Sleep (CD, 1993)
Imagine you are a moviegoer back in 1960, trying to
settle into Wild River. This may not
have been an easy task for most viewers. Within its first three-and-a-half
minutes, it has already presented us with an astonishing richness of different
materials.
It begins conventionally enough, with Twentieth
Century Fox’s proclamation of the CinemaScope format
and a Technicolor blue backdrop for the announcement (in bright yellow
lettering) of the film’s title and its principal star, Montgomery Clift. But
what is that sad trumpet on the soundtrack? It sails all alone until,
eventually, a few guitar chords and a subdued orchestra kick in. And suddenly –
before the musical theme has properly or neatly resolved itself – we are into
what seems to be newsreel footage, in black and white, of the historic Tennessee
River floods; a recounting of one man’s heartbreaking loss of family members;
and, finally, an outline (in detached, voice-of-god narration) of the
governmental response to this crisis: the creation of the Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA) in 1933, authorised to buy up and redevelop all the land within
a particular radius.
Yet this documentary passage is itself an emotionally
charged fragment, as intense and melodramatic as anything to follow in the
film’s fiction. And already there is some foreshadowing of the elements of that
fiction: establishing images (now in colour) of the landscape of Garthville intercut with Chuck (Clift) approaching in a
plane. The narration (which will not reappear in the film) cues us, as well, to
the premise of the drama: the resistance of some ‘old timers’ to giving up
their land for the sake of Theodore Roosevelt’s grand plan of American renewal.
The central figure of this resistance in Wild River is Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet,
playing a part much older than her 45 years), stern matriarch to not only her
own family but, seemingly, the entire community of Garthville.
Arriving at the local TVA office, Chuck is warned by a sanguine work associate
(played by Kazan’s wife, Barbara Loden, later the
director of Wanda in 1970) that
convincing Ella to sell will not be easy.
Kazan shot to fame through his close, collaborative
association with great dramatists – Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Budd Schulberg – and his
adaptation of John Steinbeck in East of
Eden (1955). The screenwriter of that last film, Paul Osborn, also did the
script for Wild River; however, in
this case, the source material was not a single, substantial play or novel, but
elements drawn together and synthesised from two quite different novels, Dunbar’s Cove (1957) by Borden Deal,
which provided the basic old-versus-new premise; and Mud on the Stars (1942) by William Bradford Huie,
a largely autobiographical account which gave Kazan and Osborn much rich,
behavioural detail of how a Southern clan like the Garths functioned, and its
resistance to the TVA initiative.
In a 1936 documentary on the work of the TVA (viewable
on YouTube), the problems of the Tennessee Valley in that period are described
as the “problems of America” itself. And, even in this official, informational
context, such problems, as they are inventoried, run a gamut from natural
phenomena (floods, soil erosion) to social issues (in particular, poverty – with
the documentary footage lingering on the homes and farms abandoned by their
owners).
This is doubtless what profoundly attracted Elia Kazan to the project: its fierce, tightly enmeshed mix
of the personal and the political, governmental edicts and family law,
progressive individuals (such as Chuck) and conservative communities. Kazan and
his collaborators dramatised this mixture of small and large, intimate and
social contexts, in the best and most vivid way they knew how: in a love story
involving Chuck and Carol (Lee Remick in only her
fifth major screen role, and her second for Kazan after A Face in the Crowd in 1957), who is Ella’s granddaughter – and, at
first, merely a silent embodiment of this Southern status quo.
But there is nothing sickly sentimental or
symbolically schematic about the star-crossed love match between Carol and
Chuck: it registers, still today, as one of the most profoundly erotic
encounters in cinema.
Many critics and scholars today speak of the
distinction between fiction cinema and the essay film – a very knowing,
self-conscious variant on traditional documentary. Wild River is one of those masterpieces that powerfully remind us
that even the most seemingly classical Hollywood narrative is also and equally constructed as an essay: a dramatic essay, an
essay unfolded in the moves and actions of the plot.
The characters embody specific bundles of social
values – positions of social status, gender, race, age, position of authority
(or lack of it) in their community, and so on – and enter into clashes,
alliances and rapprochements that express the broader movements of society
itself in history. Jacques Rivette praised the film,
in his 1962 Cahiers du cinéma review, for grasping what he called “one of
cinema’s master-themes: the confrontation of the old and the new” – thus
leading to a surprising but perfectly apt comparison of Kazan with Eisenstein
and Dovzhenko.
Kazan’s fondness for the dramatic essay form, and the
creative energy he poured into it, has doubtless led to some commentators’
dismissal or downplaying of his achievement – as if he were only ever a filmmaker
dedicated to large-scale or “white elephant” sociological-moral concerns. Yet
Kazan’s investment in vibrant detail – or what writers in the Manny Farber tradition call termite art, the supposed opposite of white elephant grandiosity
– affirms the reality that (as Jean-Pierre Gorin has
recently remarked) “it’s a natural path to be, at times, white elephant. The
problem is when you stay there and you don’t become termite”. Kazan was never
afraid of stepping up to the plate of the Big Issues. But he was just as
tenacious when it came to creating singular details that rang with an
individualised truth.
The great screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière advises, in his book The Secret Language
of Film (1995), that one good way to guarantee such moments of truth – and
to break the initial schematism of any given thematic
structure – is to ensure that each character has a moment on screen where they
“go the end of themselves”: where they do something unexpected, perhaps even
completely contrary to their psychology as we have hitherto grasped it as
viewers. Wild River, despite its
ample gallery of secondary stock characters, is full of these moments – which
it refers to, in a marvellous line, as “getting awfully human”.
A striking example is provided by the scene in which
Ella “demonstrates” to Chuck what her way of life is all about: she saunters
over to one of her most trusted black workers, Sam (Robert Earl Jones), and demands
that he sell her his beloved dog. At the start of this scene, we assume that
Ella is showing off her personal power – and her capacity to abuse it, in the
most terrible way. But Ella, it turns out, has made a calculation that we have
not made; she knows that Sam, despite his status as Ella’s employee, will not
agree to her demand – and that he will calmly protest that she “don’t have the
right” to ask such a thing.
This then becomes the substance of her demonstration
to Chuck: “You see, young man, Sam and me, we don’t sell. Sam don’t sell his dog and I don’t sell my land, that I poured
my heart’s blood into”. Going to the end of oneself gets another twist, much
later, when we see that all the workers do eventually leave Ella’s farm for the
sake of the financial relief offered by the government – all, that is, except
for Sam.
For me, Wild
River and its successor, Splendor in the Grass (1961), mark the zenith of Kazan’s career as a film director. This was a
transitional moment in his career and Wild
River is, on many levels, a transitional work in American cinema as a
whole. Kazan was soon to hurl himself out of the comfort zone of the Hollywood
system by embarking on the autobiographical drama America, America (1963), followed by other sorts of experiments in
creative independence (including writing novels).
It is clear that, by the beginning of the 1960s, he
craved a type of artistic modernism that mainstream US cinema was, at first,
reluctant to embrace. Wild River reflects this desire in its opening collage of documentary and fiction
materials, its frankness in relation to sexual matters, and in certain nuances
of performance that break the Hollywood mould and reach a level of both
immediacy and complexity that resembles what John Cassavetes had begun to depict in his work as a director.
Kazan, however was closer in his method and style to
Nicholas Ray, another key transitional figure of US cinema: he wanted to retain
the solid, base structure of the classical storytelling model, while demanding
the freedom to intensify and complicate the details, creating (via editing)
unusual, alternating rhythms of passion and contemplation. This is no doubt why Rivette saw Kazan’s work of the early 1960s as, akin
to serial music, a “decisive step toward the definitively atonal cinema that
all the great works of today announce”.
But there are also classical coups of disarming
simplicity in Wild River: such as the
decisive action – filmed in a single, unadorned shot, without any stylistic
underlining whatsoever – of Carol making the leap to join Chuck on a makeshift
river barge.
In the dialectics of his vision, Kazan looked both
backward and forward for inspiration – and for a way to remain existentially
true to his own experience. Both Wild
River and Splendor in the Grass return to and work over a
period of US history that Kazan, again like Ray, had experienced as a young
man, and which left an indelible mark on his sensibility: the boom-and-bust
transition that led from the Wall St crisis of the 1920s into the long Great
Depression.
Where Splendor in the Grass seizes the interplay of financial problems and intimate blockages under the
sign of (as Rivette noted) a generalised state of
crisis – in which neurotic, aggressive and self-destructive energies rule – Wild River is, for all its sound and
fury, a calmer film. It marks a rare moment in Kazan’s cinema where love,
despite every obstacle placed in its way by the social environment, actually
does win the day.
There are times during the unfolding of Wild River when no viewer, casual or
erudite, can possibly imagine that such a conclusion is on the cards. In one of
the film’s finest and richest scenes, Carol searches for a sign of affirmation,
of commitment, from the increasingly silent and evasive Chuck. Is he about to
utter some crushing banality about their affair being good while it lasted –
but that it cannot survive the glare of harsh reality? Carol intuits this dialogue
before he can even say it: she reads her lover as if she were the finest, most
delicately piece of radiographic equipment in the world: “Why did you say that,
that way?”
But Carol’s bluntness, the shameless confession of her
need, has an unexpected (albeit agonisingly delayed) effect on Chuck: it turns
him around. The elusive realm of existential authenticity that so marked
American drama (both on stage and screen) during the 1950s – so easily
sidetracked into the worst kinds of ideological double-talk and rationalisation
– seizes this couple in its grip. And they prove themselves equal to it, worthy
of it.
The old and the new: the movement or uneasy transition
between them is itself a complex, dramatic essay. Kazan spins the situation
around many times in the course of the film, to keep viewing it from a fresh
angle. Is the new necessarily superior, is the old necessarily bad? When the
political collides with the personal, a new set of prismatic reflections is
struck: Carol tells Chuck that he is “not easy to love” – a backwardness or
resistance (captured so well in Clift’s performance) in his deepest nature,
contradicting his surface beliefs and liberal values, which is ironically close
to Ella’s own unrepentant staunchness.
If Wild River is an essay, its central topic is what Chuck drolly describes as everything
that falls under “the general heading of progress”. But there is no such thing
(the film shows us) as progress in general: there is only, in each case and
circumstance, the particular problem, the isolated breakthrough, and the
irretrievable loss. Kazan’s particular genius in Wild River was his dynamic ability weigh
up all these dizzying factors and yet still guide us to a satisfying
point of equilibrium.
© Adrian Martin January 2015 |