YMMV / Wild River

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Does the sheriff let the mob attack Chuck and Carol due to sharing their racism and anger at Chuck's hiring black workers? Or rather, does he want to see Chuck roughed up due to dislike for the TVA (he does make a comment about being sympathetic with Ella earlier on) and just see the mob as a means to an end for that.
  • On related note, did he stop the beating once Chuck was in real danger due to Even Evil Has Standards, or out of Pragmatic Villainy to avoid being caught up in the potentially career-ending scandal that would follow the murder of a government employee while he stood by.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Wild River is a very rare example of a film that was adapted from two independent but similarly themed books by two separate authors (Dunbar's Cove by Borden Deal and Mud on the Stars by William Bradford Huie) and has a major focus on water. One of the only other movies to do this, the much more famous The Towering Inferno (adapted from The Tower by Richard Martin Stern, and the Glass Inferno by Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson) has a major focus on fire.
• Retroactive Recognition: Bruce Dern appears in an uncredited role as TVA employee named Roper in the first film of his (sixty years long and counting) career.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The relationship between Chuck and Carol is seen by some as unnecessary and diverting attention away from Chuck's Worthy Opponent dynamics with Ella.
• Signature Scene: Plenty of people remember the scene where Ella demonstrates her dissatisfaction with eminent domain by pretending to force her farmhand Sam (played by the father of James Earl Jones) to sell his hunting dog Blue for what seems like a fair price but doesn't take sentiment into account.
  Sam: Blue's not for sell.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Joe John Garth gets some characterization as the most loyal of Ella's sons due to throwing Chuck into the river for insulting his mother (all with a smile on his face) and not taking part in trying to have her declared incompetent, but he has far less screen time than either of his brothers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Several interesting plot lines from the novels aren't included in the film.
  • Dunbar's Cove
    • The family's eldest son gets a job working on the dam, with his father seeing the construction up close during a failed attempt to make the young man (who feels a sense of pride and investment in the dam) come home.
    • The family trying to build an earth dam of its own to block the rushing water and keep their land.
    • Chuck's counterpart helps plow the family's land as a way of breaking tension.
    • The TVA tries to find a section of land as similar to the one the family is being forced off of as possible for them to live on.
  • Mud on the Stars.
    • Sam's loyalty to the Garths could have been better developed if the film had referenced an incident where the Garths' frightened off a lynch mob after one of their black workers for beating up a white farmer.
    • The Garths try to convince the government to build the dam a little lower to reduce the water flow and let their island survive.