Plot
A young idealistic Tennessee Valley Authority administrator, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) comes to a small town in Tennessee to enforce the clearing of the land to be flooded by a new dam on the Tennessee River in the early 1930s. An aging 80-year-old matriarch, Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet who was only 45 at the time), refuses to sell her land to the federal government, and the film anticipates much of the environmental debates concerning the artificial control of rivers.
Glover falls in love with the matriarch's granddaughter, Carol Garth Baldwin (Lee Remick).
The film also portrays some of the racial issues in the South after the Great Depression.
Read more about this topic: Wild River (film)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
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