These flowing streams not only serve as daunting obstacles in the struggle between man and nature, but also as stunning backdrops. They showcase our leading star's perilous journey through rough and churning waters on a voyage that will lead them to either triumph or transformation.
Humphrey Bogart, who won his only Oscar for his role in The African Queen, uttered one my favorite river movies lines: "I don't blame you for being scared - not one bit. Nobody with good sense ain't scared of white water".
But we're glad to be onboard this trip. We have enthusiastically embraced the river, just as Katharine Hepburn's character did when she replied: "I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!"
So as the 91st Academy Awards are quickly approaching, here is a list of my favorites, involving some action-packed whitewater scenes and of course plenty of river time.
The African Queen (1951)
Arguably one of the greatest river movies of all time, as Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, take on the jungle, the rapids, and the German Navy in this classic movie adventure.
The African Queen deck was tight and too small to shoot on, given the size of the bulky Technicolor cameras. While on the river, most of the filming had to be done on a sprawling raft mock-up in order to shoot the close-ups. The cumbersome raft (built over three large canoes) would get stuck on submerged logs, while cameras and lights would get caught in the overhanging foliage of the jungle.
"The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare”, wrote Hepburn in her 1987 memoir The Making of The African Queen. “The engine on the Queen would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled up by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets.”
The scenes considered too dangerous to shoot on the river were shot in studio water tanks in Isleworth Studios, Middlesex.
And in the days before CGI, the dramatic sequence of the African Queen going over a waterfall and through rapids was actually an eight-foot model boat shot through a telephoto lens. Flim makers layered their footage, incorporating the location sequences with the miniature boat careening over a waterfall.
The River of No Return (1954)
Riding the wave of the success of The African Queen, moviegoers returned to theaters to journey downriver again, but this time with blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe rocking the boat.
While trying to start a new life together with his son after being released from prison, Robert Mitchum works his farm along the river, only to have Monroe and her low-life gambler fiance wash up along its shores.
"The Indians call it the River of No Return," Mitchum's character says as they head into a series of treacherous rapids. "From here on, you'll find out why."
Including the raft trip down the river, the film is an action-packed western with mountain lions, gunfights, and Indian attacks, but Monroe is still given time to serenade us with four songs, including the movie's willowy title tune.
Flimed in British Columbia on the Bow River, the production was plagued with problems, with the insistence from the director that the cast would perform many of their own stunts. In one incident, Monroe's hip waders filled with water, dragging her under and nearly drowning her after slipping on a rock in the river. Mitchum and others jumped to her rescue, but her ankle was injured as a result.
Another mishap occurred when Monroe and Mitchum's raft became broached on the rocks in the middle of the river, nearly capsizing before some quick thinking stuntmen saved the day and pulled them off the rocks.
It was much safer but not much drier for them while filming the remaining scenes indoors in Los Angeles. Onboard a hydraulic platform in front of a giant screen, Monroe and Mitchum clung to rafting props, while men stood to the sides and splashed them with buckets of water.
Deliverance (1972)
It's a Heart of Darkness-like voyage into the rural backwoods of the south, as four suburban Atlanta men take a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the Georgia Mountain's wilderness. Burt Reynolds' character calls it the “the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unf*cked-up river in the South." But time is ticking. In a short time the river, the rapids, and even the town will be flooded over with the imminent construction of a dam.
After a bumpy ride through rapids, the light-hearted adventure turns to horror when they encounter a pair of dangerous mountain men. Separated from the others, John Voight's character was tied to a tree and could only watch helplessly as his canoe partner Ned Beatty is violently raped by one of the men. That attack sets off a chilling sequence of events, including a disastrous turn through whitewater that challenges the canoeist's moral codes as they fight to survive.
Flimed on Northern Georgia's Chattooga River, the actors who performed their own stunts spent two weeks learning to canoe the rapids.
"We rehearsed for quite a long period," director John Boorman, told The Guardian in a 2017 interview, "Because we had to get the actors up to scratch in archery and canoeing. I had already been down the Chattooga, a ferocious river, to make sure it was safe."
In the scene where the canoe broke in two (five were actually destroyed during filming), Boorman coordinated a release of water from the upstream Tallulah Falls dam.
While Boorman was down below, tough-guy Reynolds (who nixed using a dummy in the shot because the stunt coordinator thought it looked too phony), requested to have the scene re-shot with himself going over the falls instead.
"I dream sometimes of the water coming," years later Reynolds told the Hollywood Reporter, "I looked around and there was a tidal wave coming at me. I went over the falls and the first thing that happened I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone, and to this day it hurts. Then I went down to the water below and it was a whirlpool. I couldn’t get out and a guy there said if you get caught, just go to the bottom. You can get out but you can't swim against it. So I went down to the bottom. What he didn’t tell me was it was going to shoot me up like a torpedo. So I went out."
Years before the phrase "wardrobe malfunction" would become popular, Reynolds would have one while caught in the force of that churning whirlpool.
"They said later that they saw this 30-year-old guy in costume go over the waterfall and then about fifteen minutes later they saw this nude man come out," Reynolds recalled in the interview, "It had torn everything—my boots and everything off."
For more about the movie see Canoe and Kayak Magazine article Summer of Deliverance.
River Wild (1994)
She stars as a suburban mom and former white-water rafter who, while trying to save her marriage, battles wits with an evil Kevin Bacon and runs a dangerous stretch of river
Many of the movie's whitewater scenes were filmed on Montana's Kootenai River, while other scenes were shot on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, the Colorado River in Utah, and Oregon's Rogue River.
While most of the dangerous river scenes did require expert stunt doubles, Streep did several of her own stunts in the film on some milder river sections, but even those had some peril when the star was swept off the raft into the river.
''Actually, I was really very quiet and not scared, which is not at all how I thought I'd react under these circumstances", Streep told the New York Times in 1994. ''I remember sinking down to the bottom with this powerful and freezing water pulling me in deeper."
Wearing a PFD, she was rescued by a hired kayaker after the river pushed her 500 yards downstream.
The White Mile (1994)
Like The Titanic and A Perfect Storm, we have no doubts about the fate of the rafters. But it's hard to look away as we watch their misguided steps that lead to disaster. In the end, five men are killed, setting up moral crises within their corporate world when the surviving relatives file a liability suit against the firm.
A not-so-nice Alan Alda stars as a hard-charging and unrepentant advertising executive who bullies not only his colleagues and clients into the male-bonding trip, but also the raft guide by piling too many men into the raft.
During filming, however, California's South Fork of the American River (standing in for the Chilko River) dished out more than a few licks on Alda.
In a 1994 interview with St Louis Post-Dispatch, Alda tells how he and co-star Robert Loggia were struggling to stay afloat in the rapids while shooting one of the extremely edgy and authentic whitewater sequences above a big drop in the river.
"We didn't go over, but we came close enough I remember thinking to myself," recalled Alda "When the hell are they going to come out here with one of those kayaks?' Everybody thought the scene was going great and they weren't going to interrupt it. We had gone twice as far they said we would before they stopped us. And we were heading for the waterfall!"
Without A Paddle (2004)
While Deliverance and The White Mile made us all cringe, the trio in Without A Paddle can only make us smile at their awkward ineptness on the wild river.
