RESTORED 35MM PRINT!

Counted by such Preminger specialists as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dave Kehr, and Richard McGuinness as one of the director’s finest, River of No Return was Preminger’s first film in CinemaScope – ideal to handle his two leading stars’ legendary chests! – and his only western, a genre for which he had no feeling. (“I’m not interested in horses,” he commented.) The big surprise is that despite that aversion to horse opera and the cataclysmic rows between director and female star – “Directing Marilyn Monroe was like directing Lassie,” Preminger gallantly observed – River turned out to be such a terrific film. Set in the Canadian Northwest and shot around Banff, River of No Return was conceived with an idea taken from Bicycle Thieves (showing later this summer). A romantic triangle forms in the wildest west: a saloon singer longing for affection and respectability; her no-good gambling man, intent on staking a gold claim; and a farmer with a troubled past reunited with his young son.  To recap:  two impossibly sexy, surly and simpering stars, lashes of romance, music, and adventure (the raft sequences are thrilling), and acres of Rocky Mountain scenery captured in sweeping widescreen compositions. As one critic recently put it: “If you’d think it would be fun to watch Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe float around on a raft looking insanely beautiful, make a beeline!” (Time Out New York). On a more exalted level, André Bazin recognized River as the one CinemaScope film “in which the format really added something important to the mise en scène.”

Rated PG.