Revisiting Elia Kazan's 'Wild River'

"Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet star in "Wild River," a stirring drama set during Depression-era Tennessee. The film revolves around true events — the controlled flooding of the Tennessee River by the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority. In order to flood the river, though, the residents need to be relocated, but one woman (Van Fleet) refuses to leave her homestead. Enter Clift as the TVA agent sent out from Washington, D.C., to persuade her to leave the area where they have resided for generations."

"The creation of the vast system of dams... tamed the Tennessee River, which almost annually flooded, carrying away millions of dollars worth of land, buildings, livestock — not to mention people [and] brought electricity to a seven-state region that had been nearly devoid of modern life's most essential power source..."

"[Kazan] believed in the TVA, perhaps the most successful act of civil and social engineering in American history. Those dams were mighty constructions — it is said their individual masses were sometimes 12 times that of all the pyramids, that you could have buried 20 Empire State Buildings in some of their excavations."

"...those great dams abide. They are still the property of the U.S. government, and the money they earn goes to dozens of local governments and institutions. "The New South" — no longer backward and benighted but an economically, socially and culturally vibrant region -- began in the Tennessee Valley."