Smokescreen: Wild River (1960)

Wild River embraces some of cinema’s master-themes: the confrontation of the old and the new, and the sociological-moral concerns. A Tennessee Valley Authority bureaucrat comes to the river to do what none of his predecessors have been able to do - evict a stubborn octogenarian from her island before the rising waters engulf her. It is a battle of wills between government authority and generations-old land owners, and their reaction to the destruction of their land. If Wild River was an essay, its central topic would fall under “the general heading of progress”. But the film shows us there is no such thing as progress in general: there is only, in each case and circumstance, the particular problem, the isolated breakthrough, and the irretrievable loss.  But is the new necessarily superior, is the old necessarily bad? In this collision of the old and the new, Kazan spins the situation around, to keep viewing it from a fresh angle, and the transition between them is complex and uneasy.