People by the river

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Movie
German title People by the river
Original title The River
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1984
length 122 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Mark Rydell
script Robert Dillon ,
Julian Barry
production Robert Cortes ,
Edward Lewis
music John Williams
camera Vilmos Zsigmond
cut Sidney Levin
occupation

People on the River is a feature film by American director Mark Rydell from 1984. The melodrama is based on a story by Robert Dillon and was produced by the film studio Universal Pictures .

action

USA , in the early 1980s: Tom and Mae Garvey are the owners of a small farm in eastern Tennessee . The 320 hectare land has been owned by Tom's family for generations and is located in a valley where the majority of the people are farming. The existence of the family of four, as well as the other farmers, depends on the nearby river, which supplies the corn farm with water, but is also a constant threat due to regular flooding. When heavy rains hit the valley in autumn, the river overflows its banks. A dam built by the family, poorly sealed with sandbags, cannot withstand the masses of water, and the maize fields of the Garveys are flooded. While sealing the dam, Tom is trapped by his overturning bulldozer and can only be saved from drowning by his wife and eldest son Lewis with great difficulty, while their little daughter Beth witnesses the ghostly scene in disbelief.

After the corn harvest fell victim to the floods, Tom tries to get another loan from the local bank. The bank director, who has known Tom for several years, refuses to give him financial support and cites the indebted farm and lower land prices as the reason. When Mae and the two children who were waiting in front of the building demonstratively enter the bank, the bank director agrees to defer payments. As it turns out in the course of the plot, the large landowner Joe Wade is putting a lot of pressure on the bank. Wade, who was once friends with Tom's wife, plans to buy up the land in the valley and build a reservoir to irrigate his own lands. A senator , the Leutz company and a lot of big business are on Joe Wade's side. In addition, the much cheaper hydro-electric energy should create jobs in the area marked by mass unemployment.

In order to be able to pay for the repairs to the destroyed bulldozer and the house, the Garvey family goes to an auction to sell, among other things, an agricultural machine valued at US $ 6,000. When they arrive, they notice that dozens of people are camping in tents and campers outside the city gates - former farmers who have given up their unprofitable farms and are standing without government support and hoping for odd jobs. The sale of the machine turns into a losing business: it is sold to the highest bidder for just under one sixth of its actual value. There is an uproar when a farmer offers all his belongings at auction to make a fresh start in the city. The farmers present rebel against the sale of their lands until the heavily indebted man has to admit that he has long since lost the land and only offers the cattle and equipment at the auction .

With the money won at the auction, the Garveys pay for the seeds for the new corn harvest and carry out repairs on the house. The money will soon be used up and the family is on the verge of economic ruin. When Jessica , the Garveys' dairy cow, dies because the family has no money to pay for the vet visit, Tom decides to act. Through a cousin , he finds a job in a factory as a welder . He decides to leave the farm and his family for three months and return in time for the corn harvest. Only when he arrives at the factory does Tom realize that he has been recruited as a strike breaker , and he has to fight back in the open truck of the angry mob striking . While her husband works fifty hours a week in the steelworks , Tom's wife and their children have to run the farm alone. The hard work of men takes its toll , and Mae wedges his arm in the chain gears of the irrigation machine in the fields while her children are at school. Unable to free herself, the petite young woman with the badly bleeding wound under the vehicle waits until she accidentally finds Joe Wade and takes him to the hospital. Released back home with makeshift provisions, Wade tries to persuade the weakened Mae to leave Tom and start a new, secure future with him. Although he is married himself, Wade still has great feelings for Mae Garvey, but she rejects him with the words "It's too late" .

In the meantime Tom befriends dark-skinned Harley and young Baines in the factory, which he cannot leave because of the striking staff. Baines, like Tom, has entrusted the running of the farm to his pregnant wife, but suffers from the separation from her. When Baines tries to flee, he is attacked by the striking workers, and only with great effort Harley and Tom manage to free the young man from the tricky situation. When Tom meets Mae and the children for the first time in weeks, they both spend the night in a motel while Lewis and Beth are looked after by Tom's cousin. In the motel room, however, it is not possible for Tom to get intimate with Mae. Both blame it on the joy of reunion. Tom tells her about the tough working conditions in the factory and about a nightmare he had. He dreamed that the river had turned into a gigantic snake with no beginning or end, and had slowly taken the air away from him. When Tom asks about Joe Wade, whom he fears as a rival, Mae hides the incident on the farm and Wade's courageous intervention.

As the days of hard work in the factory are slowly coming to an end, one day a young deer comes into the factory building in search of food. The men, including Tom, are amazed by this unexpected visitor, stop working and try to catch the animal in order to eat it. When the men surrounded the deer after a time-consuming chase , the animal began to urinate out of fear on a pile of rubble, on which it had fled. The men feel sorry for the deer, take him out of the factory hall and release him into the wild. When the foreman announces that Tom and the other men are no longer needed and can collect their wages, fate does not seem to be kind to the scabs. The unions and the employers have come to an agreement, the strike is over and this time the strike breakers are not expecting trucks to protect them from the angry mob. Tom and the others are handed over to the picket lines armed with clubs and crowbars outside the factory gates. After it looks as if a violent confrontation cannot be prevented, the crowd clears an alley and lets the men go under furious insults. Tom stands in the way of a woman from the crowd, insults and spat at him.

When Tom celebrates a reunion with his family on the farm after a long time, the corn has grown tall and ready to be harvested. But a Joe Wade employee offers the Garveys a lower price than they had hoped. The maize is too damp because the family planted it too late. Tom is furious, suggests the man down and moves to the Leutz - corporate headquarters , where he who is Joe Wade just in the middle of a meeting, demonstratively throws a corn cob, to listen to his opinion on the harvested grain. Joe tries to calm Tom down, lets him in on the secret of the planned reservoir and tries to convince him to sell his land. However, Tom does not think about it and in his anger destroys a model of the planned reservoir.

As rains swell the river, Tom prepares to reinforce the dams off his land with his family again. But fate favors the forces of nature again - the transmission of Tom's car fails. During the repairs, the father of the family, who is under enormous pressure, drives his little daughter, who is holding the lantern, and tirelessly drives his exhausted son on. Wife Mae can no longer watch this and confronts Tom why he always takes the work on his shoulders alone. Thereupon Tom stand by the other farmers in the area in a solidarity campaign and help him to protect the dams from the approaching flood with bulldozers, under the eyes of Joe Wade. In fact, after hours of fighting over the farmland, the rain ends and the river seems to be in its place thanks to the dam and the collaboration of the farming families. But soon Joe Wade shows up with two trucks full of men - unemployed farmers from the city, whom Wade promised 100 dollars a day if they destroy the embankment, including Baines, Tom's friend from the factory, who also owns his farm how the other men lost. Although Tom threatens the crowd with a rifle and has the bulldozers of his colleagues behind him, a man manages to get to the dam and blast a hole in him . The water pours onto Tom's land, who immediately begins to seal the leak with sandbags. His example is soon followed by Mae and his children, as well as Joe Wade's community-minded assistants who are now switching to Tom's side. With Tom's adversary's expensive jeep , the group finally succeeds in sealing the leak. Joe Wade, who also closes the last leak in the dam with a sandbag, appeals to Tom and Mae that sooner or later they will sell their land to him, be it due to a flood, drought or falling grain prices. The Garveys are not unsettled by Joe Wade and at the end of the film they harvest the corn saved from the flood, with Beth believing in her childlike naivete that she can earn a million US dollars with the corn.

History of origin

People on the River is based on the story of the same name by screenwriter Robert Dillon . Dillon adapted the material for the big screen together with Julian Barry . The film was shot in Birmingham , Alabama and east Tennessee. Many of the film scenes were shot on 440 acre land near the Holston River that Universal Studios acquired. In just four weeks, 400 acres of forest were cleared and turn-of-the-century farmhouses were built. For the flood scenes, the film crew used an existing river with a dam that was dismantled for repair work. The dam was rebuilt and repaired with the help of US Army engineers.

reception

People on the River was one of three American homeland melodramas, also derisively titled "save the farm" films, which were released in 1984 . Like Robert Benton's A Place in the Heart (with Sally Field and John Malkovich ) who played in the 1930s, and Richard Pearces Country (with Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard ) who was set in the present, he tells the story of the stubborn and brave Farmers determined to defend their family property against bank claims. Mark Rydell himself is said to have dedicated the film to the disappearing America, the "America of the independent farming families" .

Mark Rydell's film premiered in US cinemas on December 19, 1984 and received most of the critics for the acting performance of the two main actors Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek , who were 28 and 34 years old at the time of shooting , praised. The camera work by Vilmos Zsigmond and the background music by Oscar winner John Williams were also praised . The film grossed $ 8.8 million at the US box office and was considered more successful than its rival Country ($ 2.2 million). People on the river , however, was overshadowed by Ein Platz im Herz , which grossed more than four times that amount with a profit of 34.7 million US dollars and was nominated for various film awards.

Reviews

  • "Flat and superficial in the character drawing, hardly ever really exciting; only in a few scenes does the melodramatic" Heimatfilm "seriously deal with its problems." - " Lexicon of International Films " (CD-ROM edition), Systhema, Munich 1997
  • “Mark Rydell's homeland melodrama is in the tradition of films such as 'The Southerner' (1945, Jean Renoir ) and 'Wilder Fluß' (1960, Elia Kazan ), but puts political factors in the foreground more than its predecessors: Wade ( Scott Glenn) Big business and an influential senator, corruption of the ruling classes is discussed. 'The River' addresses social issues such as mass unemployment and small business debt. With Mel Gibson, director Mark Rydell has a convincing leading actor. " ( VideoWoche )
  • "A drama with Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek, captured in wonderful pictures." ( DVD & Video Report )
  • “The veteran Rydell stages it with a lot of homeland realism and successfully relies on his top-class actors. The socio-critical aspect of the material is largely lost. ”(Rating: 2½ stars = above average) - Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz in Lexicon“ Films on TV ” (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 582
  • "Greatly played 'Heimatfilm'." ( TV Movie )

Remarks

  • Leading actress Sissy Spacek immersed herself in her role as the farmer Mae Garvey so much that she moved into the farmhouse built especially for the shooting and, among other things, provided the film crew with homemade cakes.
  • Based on Robert Dillon's and Julian Barry's script, the writer Steven Bauer processed the story into a 260-page novel, which was published in 1984 under the title The River .
  • The film marks the acting debut of Mark Rydell's daughter Amy , who can be seen in the supporting role of Betty Gaumer .
  • With Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange ( Country ) and Sally Field ( A Place in the Heart ), all three leading actresses from the 1984 films "save the farm" have been nominated for the prestigious US American film awards Golden Globe and Oscar .
  • People on the River was originally given an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America , which forbade moviegoers under the age of 17 to watch the film without their parents or adults accompanying them. Following a protest, the film was given a PG-13 rating, warning parents that some content could pose a hazard to children under the age of thirteen.
  • The film music soloist in the Love Theme was the trumpeter Warren Luening .

Awards

People on the river was in 1985 when Oscar -Verleihung for four Academy Awards nominations, including Sissy Spacek , which was worshiped for her part as a self-sacrificing farmer's wife, and film composer John Williams, who in the same year, another nomination for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death received. However, the film was not awarded any of the regular film awards. However, there was a special Oscar ( Special Achievement Award ) for sound editor Kay Rose , for whom the melodrama meant the seventh collaboration with Mark Rydell.

There were further nominations in the same year for the Golden Globe Awards , also for Sissy Spacek for best leading actress in a drama, as well as John Williams background music. The film was also awarded by the Association of Motion Picture Sound Editors.

Oscar 1985

  • Special Achievement Award (Sonderoscar) for the best sound editing - sound effects

Nominated in the categories

  • Best Actress (Sissy Spacek)
  • Best film score
  • Best camera
  • Best tone

Golden Globe 1985

Nominated in the categories

  • Best Actress - Drama (Sissy Spacek)
  • Best film score

Further

Motion Picture Sound Editors 1985

  • Best sound editing - sound effects

literature

Web links