The River (Jean Renoir, 1951): France, India, USA

Reviewed by Byron Potau.  Viewed on DVD

Some films inexplicably gain a reputation as a masterpiece, though it seems obvious that they are clearly not.  Whether critics are afraid to reverse this notion or if they simply continue to deny the obvious is unclear, but what is clear is that Jean Renoir’s 1951 film, The River, is not a masterpiece.
The film is a coming of age story for one teenage girl, Harriet played by Patricia Walters.  She comes from an English family of mostly girls and one boy living in India.  Her life and the lives of her older sister Valerie, and half English half Indian neighbor Melanie are changed when a one legged former soldier, Captain John played by real life amputee Thomas E. Breen, comes to visit Melanie’s father and all three women develop crushes on him.
The color cinematography by Claude Renoir is beautiful and reminiscent of other Technicolor films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, and is the films greatest strength.  The acting, a mixture of little known actors and non actors, is mediocre at best and really hurts the film.  Even the voice over narration by June Hillman is dull and uninvolving.  This causes the film’s story to be not very engaging for the viewer.  Another fault I find with the film is that it does not give us much in the way of Indian culture and we are merely watching the problems of British people in India.  There is one exception in a delightful dance by Melanie in visual accompaniment sequence to one of Harriet stories.  It is one of the few times the film is alive with any sense of Indian culture.  Aside from that the film is little more than a beautiful painting and pales in comparison to Renoir’s work in the thirties.