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Wild River



Regarded as one of the crowning achievements in the career of both director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) and actor Montgomery Clift, Wild River charted new territory for cinema at the dawn of the 1960s, combining psychology, eroticism, documentary realism, and exquisite pictorial beauty within the CinemaScope frame.

In the early 1930s, an administrator for the Tennessee Valley Authority (Clift) arrives in the small town of Garthville with the business of convincing an elderly landowner to sell her land to the government. Soon afterward, he's thrown into conflicts emotional (falling in love with the landowner's widowed granddaughter, played by Lee Remick, who is expected to marry another man) and societal (the employment of black labour on the authority's river project).

With its mix of the personal and the political, Wild River, in the words of critic and scholar Adrian Martin, shows us that "there is only, in each case and circumstance, the particular problem, the isolated breakthrough, and the irretrievable loss. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Wild River in a special Dual Format edition that presents the film on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

SPECIAL DUAL FORMAT (BLU-RAY + DVD) EDITION including:

• New 1080p transfer of the film on Blu-ray, with a progressive encode on the DVD
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• New feature-length audio commentary with critics Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme
• Original theatrical trailer
• Gallery of behind-the-scenes and production stills
• 32-PAGE FULL COLOUR BOOKLET featuring a new essay on the film by critic Adrian Martin, remarks about the film by director Elia Kazan, and rare archival imagery

A great film, of course, and it's recent rescue and rediscovery status has been well-earned but given that you can already get it boxed together with three other films on Blu-ray means MoC's gonna have to provide some tempting exclusive extras to make it worthwhile

February 23. Available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk

One of the features has been revealed, and its a good one:

Farran Nehme @selfstyledsiren · Jan 14

Yes, now it can be told: @glenn__Kenny & I did the commentaries for @mastersofcinema's Blu-Rays of MAN OF THE WEST and WILD RIVER due 2/23.

Thank god - Schickel's commentary is next to worthless. (I have no idea why Fox didn't hire Foster Hirsch for that one.) Kenny and Nehme were great on The Gang's All Here so I'm really excited that they're back for this one and the Mann.

Aw man, wish I hadn't bought Fox's BD. Glenn and the Siren's commentary is sure to be far better than Schickel's.

EDIT: I stand corrected - both aren't bad and I wouldn't say either is substantially better than the other.

Blu Ray.com gives it 4 stars, but Svet indicts Fox with criticism of its altering color timing on titles like this and Desk Set. Which is such a shame, considering how great so many of their catalog releases look (especially black and white ones).

DVDBeaver mentions that and I may have to agree, assuming the 35mm print I saw at BAM some years ago was accurate. I definitely noticed a warm, autumnal palette, and I don't get that feeling from these screenshots. Again, this is a few years ago, as much as five, so I'd have to see it again to be sure.

There most certainly is something wrong with the color scheme of the FOX restoration, especially looking at the shade it gives to faces in many shots. Moreover, it gives the impression (though it might actually be the case, I don't know the history of the movie production at all) that many sequences have shots / counter-shots which are not matching in terms of photography.

What is even more surprising is how the last 6 minutes don't look altered so much. Whites look more pure, and color scheme looks much more neutral, especially regarding what looks like a heavy blue-bias.

I'm not sure it's better encoding on the BD disc - it looks like they tried a small touch of de-graining on the Fox Blu-Ray while Eureka just left it alone.

Anyway, both are very similar, and the Fox BD still looks very, very good, but it's a shame they had to take theirs down a notch.

Re: Schickel's commentary, I just came across this, and apparently he was rushed into the studio to do a commentary - urgency that turned out to be a complete waste because they wound up canceling the alleged February 2006 DVD release of the film, and it wasn't until Scorsese pushed Fox to release all of Kazan films that the film and the commentary saw a DVD/Blu-Ray release in late 2010.