Reseñas de la crítica

Many things distinguish Wild River from its immediate counterparts, including its feeling for the turning of the seasons, its leisurely, Chekhovian – and, at times, Fordian – sense of time and inexorable change, the subtlety of its performances, its bucolic setting and cinematography, and the oddness and concomitant strength of the core relationship that provides its dramatic and emotional backbone.

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.

The play-off between this near-despicable behavior and the passions of Chuck and Carol is balanced remarkably well by the filmmaker, giving the narrative a breadth of drama and invention to match DP Ellsworth Fredericks's stunning Cinemascope landscapes. Indeed, Kazan, perhaps better than any other director at the time, knew that land wasn't everything.