River of No Return (1954)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Frank Fenton, based on a story by Louis Lantz
Directed by Otto Preminger
Starring Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Rory Calhoun, and Tommy Rettig

Features:

• stills gallery
  
• theatrical trailer
  
• restoration comparison
  
• English and French stereo language tracks
  
• English and Spanish subtitles
  

Rating: NR, suitable for most audiences

Anamorphic: Yep. Presented at 2.55:1 widescreen aspect.

My Advice: Rent it.

Matt Calder (Mitchum) makes a decent life for himself in the rugged frontier of the American northwest. Estranged from his wife, he lives a life of solitude in a cabin he built himself, making his way through the world by hunting and farming. Everybody around him, however, suffers from serious gold fever. The hills are alive with the sounds of picks and pans. When Matt receives word that his wife has fallen ill and died, he sends for his young son Mark, and proceeds to the nearest boomtown to pick him up. While Mark was waiting, he befriended saloon girl Kay (Monroe), easily the singing and dancing queen of this little corner of nowhere. On a tiny stage she croons and keeps the bar packed with lonely prospectors and busted gamblers. One of those desperate men is Harry Weston (Calhoun), a gambler who just hit the big time - a deed for a gold mine, sitting on the richest vein in the area. Now all he has to do is make it to Council City and file his claim, and he and Kay can be married and live the good life they've always wanted.

Having retrieved his son from Kay's tender graces, Calder heads back into the hills to raise his son and live a quiet pastoral existence. Kay and Harry, having bought a raft to float downriver to Council City, find themselves washed up on the shoal near Calder's farm, thanks in part to Mark and Matthew's rescue efforts. Of course, Weston can't be held up waiting to go to Council City, so he jacks Calder, steals a rifle and a horse, and takes off for town, leaving Kay behind. Once Matt gets his wits about him and recovers from his injury, he becomes dead-set on exacting justice or vengeance from Weston, and sets off in the raft, Mark and Kay in tow, to brave the River of No Return. Along the way there are rapids, rocks, and hostile indians, and the trio must survive it all. On top of all this, Kay knows Matt's deep, dark secret - that he left his infant son and wife to do time in prison for shooting a man in the back, so she's naturally fearful of what he might do to Weston when they catch him.

River of No Return is a textbook Western in many ways, though the shift of focus from the dusty Southwest to the verdant and sparsely populated Northwest changes some of the details. No gunfights to speak of, and no cattle barons or rail tycoons, but you get to keep the half-insane prospectors, the saloons, and lots of scenes with horses and hostile Native American tribesmen. But the story is pure to the genre, with love, revenge, a hero with a past, and a dangerous natural world opposing our protagonists at every turn. And while it's straight from the formula, River of No Return manages to be interesting, at least in part because of the life given to the characters by the performers.

Monroe turns in a great show as the world-weary saloon girl who desperately wants to give Weston the benefit of the doubt, even though she suspects she's wrong about him. Mitchum's brooding no-nonsense nature fits the Calder character to the proverbial "tee," and Rettig, despite being a few years short of puberty, puts forth a degree of maturity and depth in the character of Mark that was pretty surprising. Calhoun's Weston is initially likeable, but his potential for treachery is just visible behind the eyes. In short, the level of acting talent brought to bear on a fairly generic Western is surprising.

The chief advantage of relocating your Western a few hundred miles north is the vast improvement one gains in the scenery department. The vistas and sweeping panoramic shots in the film are breathtaking. So now we have a stock Western story, well-acted and beautifully shot. All the makings of a quality matinee feature. Unfortunately, the things that make the film so instantly recognizable as a transplanted Western are also the things that hold it back, as there's only so high one can strive when starting from a generic story that had been done nearly to death by 1954.

Add to that the scarcity of substantial extras, and the DVD lands squarely in the rental category, unless you're a huge fan of one of the leading performers, or a Western completist. And I just want to take a moment to say, having reviewed the entirety of the Diamond Collection II set, that Fox needs a copywriter and copyeditor in their DVD deparment badly. The text on the back of these discs betray an often completely absent understanding of the basic plot of the film in question, including providing serious errors about major plot details. And they're also fraught with typographical errors, which seems a bit ridiculous if you're throwing the kind of money that Fox no doubt throws at its DVD operations.