Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed on DVD<\/p>\n
Some films inexplicably gain a reputation as a masterpiece, though it seems obvious that they are clearly not.\u00a0 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\u2019s 1951 film, The River, is not a masterpiece.
\nThe film is a coming of age story for one teenage girl, Harriet played by Patricia Walters.\u00a0 She comes from an English family of mostly girls and one boy living in India.\u00a0 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\u2019s father and all three women develop crushes on him.
\nThe 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.\u00a0 The acting, a mixture of little known actors and non actors, is mediocre at best and really hurts the film.\u00a0 Even the voice over narration by June Hillman is dull and uninvolving.\u00a0 This causes the film\u2019s story to be not very engaging for the viewer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is one exception in a delightful dance by Melanie in visual accompaniment sequence to one of Harriet stories.\u00a0 It is one of the few times the film is alive with any sense of Indian culture.\u00a0 Aside from that the film is little more than a beautiful painting and pales in comparison to Renoir\u2019s work in the thirties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed on DVD Some films inexplicably gain a reputation as a masterpiece, though it seems obvious that they are clearly not.\u00a0 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\u2019s 1951 film, The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}