A combustible frontier thriller
On Allan Dwan's 'The River's Edge'
A cave, somewhere along the New Mexico/Mexico border.
Three people —a woman, her rancher husband, and her suave conman ex-lover —have reached one of several boiling points while taking shelter from a rainstorm.
She is suffering from gangrene, and her two beaus are throwing down; about her, about the suitcase of money one of them swindled, and just because they’re inherently violent men and they must.
As they toss each other around in the dirt, angling for a revolver that was knocked out of their reach, they suddenly freeze. Hovering over the gun is a large rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike.
For the first time, everything goes silent; the rancher tells his ailing wife to slowly grab his rifle. She can barely hold it, and she’s worried she’ll hit one of them instead of the snake… but she must shoot.
This scene is perhaps the most famous one from Allan Dwan’s 1957 film The River’s Edge, a clash that brings its characters’ quibbles sharply into context with the unforgiving natural world.
Part film noir, part Western, and part melodrama, the film is as combustible and chaotic as its genre mishmash might suggest. Its characters switch loyalty and intention at the drop of a hat, sometimes thrillingly and sometimes clunkily.
As I mentioned, it centers on a love triangle: Meg Cameron (Debra Paget) is living on a small New Mexico ranch with her husband Ben (Anthony Quinn). After a stint behind bars in San Francisco, she is in a different kind of prison: stifling, unfulfilling farm life.
Her days are unstable and misery-filled: scorpions in her slippers, muddy water coming out of the shower head, an exploding oven. Ben seems to laugh it off… then Meg is packing her suitcase, ready to end the whole thing.
Enter her former lover and partner in crime, Nardo Denning1 (Ray Milland). He shows up as she’s about to storm out, setting in motion the rest of the movie’s whirlwind of betrayal, violence, and male posturing.
Nardo, carrying a briefcase filled with $1 million he stole, has come to get Meg back. She seems into it, until his violent tendencies pop out when they get pulled over by a policeman. With a dead cop’s blood on their hands, Nardo enlists Ben to smuggle them into Mexico so he can have a clean getaway and a new life.
The River’s Edge packs 3 movies’ worth of plot into its brisk 87-minute runtime. It works as well as it does because Dwan leans into volatility. The movie’s psychosexual battle of the wills seems to destabilize both the characters and the landscape they traverse. Punches lead to rockslides and rattlesnakes; loyalties switch like the weather; stolen money rains down on the mountains and the nearby river.
The movie’s throughlines are the hallmarks of its genre mishmash: greed, lust, and, above all else, chaos. Nardo, Ben, and Meg scheme, change, or reevaluate their position in nearly every scene; their violent dance doesn’t have enough space to fully cohere narratively, but it does emotionally.
None of them knows what they want, but they know that they want something.
The River’s Edge is available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Awesome name. Nardo!