What do you do with a Hollywood rebel actress, one who balks at the scripts she's given and is already proving to be a problem showing up on time or learning lines? Give her the leading role with a Hollywood rebel actor, in a Western (how do you mess up a Western?), and hire the town's toughest dictator director to keep her in line. Oh, and make this a Technicolor spectacular in the new CinemaScope process, too.

As a Western production, it's exciting enough, with enough baddies to go around, and peculiar Indians who show up on cue to provide a generic threat, and then go to great lengths to be slaughtered by the score. Although process work abounds, Preminger did indeed get some nice footage of his stars on real locations, and his direction is solid. Like some of the other films in this collection, River of No Return's main attraction remains Monroe herself, who indeed is more romantically photogenic than all the scenery put together. Rigged though the situtation may be, when she spreads herself across the 'Scope screen to sing, there's no denying that's what we've come to see.

Somewhere in the barroom scenes is Barbara Nichols, who like Sheree North was a Fox starlet seemingly developed to mimic or even replace (in their dreams) Marilyn Monroe. One wonders if her presence was a failed front-office ploy to give MM the idea that the studio was in charge.

Like the previous boxed-set Diamond Collection, each of these discs has been digitally remastered and cleaned up as if the lives of Fox executives were depending on it. Each comes with a short restoration demo that, if anything, is more detailed than necessary. The demos range from informative to puzzling. Comparing the new transfer to a flat old library copy doesn't seem very fair, and the split-screen comparison frames often show empty parts of the frame instead of the key actors. But the effort put into these DVDs is nothing to sniff at. River of No Return now looks like a BIG screen Western, and is very satisfying pictorially. Made in the first year of CinemaScope, it is cropped to 2:35 from its original 2:55 aspect ratio, a fact which can be noticed in the target shooting scene - even though the view is widescreen, both the shooter and the target tree branch are crowding the frame on each side!

For Audio, River is in Dolby 4.0 .

Savant's comprehensive review of all 5 Diamond Collection 2 releases can be read at This URL.

Footnote:

1. It's hard to tell, but it sounds as if Monroe is dubbed for a couple of the songs, yet sings for herself to little Tommy Rettig out by the river. Also, 1954 critics chided the title sequence for accurately reflecting America's attitude toward the great outdoors: Behind the song, Robert Mitchum chops down a tree and simply walks away, apparently having cut it down for no reason at all. Tree Killer!
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