“The modern West is often a contrast between astonishing natural splendor and ordinary human squalor: the neon of Las Vegas howling in the desert, a souvenir shop in Death Valley, or the dilapidated Navajo houses in Arizona from which children sell jewelry to Grand Canyon photo-hounds. Should we save the environment or rescue its poor lives? Wild River is one of the few movies to treat this quandary. It presents a TVA man who comes to a remote part of Tennessee with a Rooseveltian water project that will disrupt the solitude and the narrowness of many lives, and the independence of those who have preferred to live beyond the reach of civilization. Wilderness is a Romantic ideal that good intentions are doomed to destroy.
“Water is the sign of life and enlightenment, but also a means of political control: Wild River might play with Chinatown as well as with Cable Hogue. Kazan's approach grew out of personal experience of Tennessee in the New Deal years, and it is all the more redolent of do-gooder perplexity in that (despite Red River) Montgomery Clift was far from a natural Western adventurer. He is a nervous, scrawny liberal who insists on helping. His love affair with a country woman (Lee Remick) is consolation for the damage he does, and a hopeful gesture towards collaboration of city and country. But it is also a model for new Americanness: placeless, middle-class transients as ingratiating as actors; not the closed faces of unremitting rural seclusion, but people turned to the mirror of a mass society.” David Thomson