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A River Runs Through It is a 1992 American drama film directed by Robert Redford and starring Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt, Tom Skerritt, Brenda Blethyn, and Emily Lloyd. It is based on the 1976 semi-autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, adapted for the screen by Richard Friedenberg. Set in and around Missoula, Montana, the story follows two sons of a Presbyterian minister, one studious and the other rebellious, as they grow up and come of age in the Rocky Mountain region during a span of time from roughly World War I to the early days of the Great Depression, including part of the Prohibition era.^[3]

The film won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and was also nominated for Best Music, Original Score and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film grossed $43 million and received positive reviews from critics.

Editions for A River Runs Through it and Other Stories: (Paperback published in 2001), (Paperback published in 1992), (Kindle Editi.

1. Editions for A River Runs Through It: (Hardcover published in 1989), (Audio CD published in 2000), (Audio CD published i.
2. This new boxed set comprises Maclean's two great books, 'A River Runs Through It' and 'Young Men & Fire', plus an engaging collection of interviews, readings, and reflections. On the Big Blackfoot. The place that inspired the book A River Runs Through It. This moving audio retrospective. Young Men and Fire. By Norman MacLean.

Plot[edit]

The Maclean brothers, Norman and Paul, grow up in Missoula, Montana with their father, Presbyterian minister John, from whom they learn a love of fly fishing for trout in the Blackfoot River. Norman and Paul are home taught and must adhere to the strict moral and educational code of their father. As young men, the brothers navigate a dangerous waterfall. Norman leaves to attend college at Dartmouth; when he returns six years later, he finds that Paul has become a skilled fisherman.

Norman attends a July 4th dance, and meets Jessie Burns. Paul has become a fearless muckraking reporter at a newspaper in Helena. He has angered many of the locals by falling behind in a big poker game in Lolo Montana where a bar is a front for gambling and prostitution. He is also dating a Native American woman, Mabel, who is deemed inferior by the white community. Paul is arrested after fighting a man who has insulted her, and Norman is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from the police to come and bail Paul out of jail.

After Norman and Jessie go on several dates, she asks that Norman make an effort to get along with her brother Neal, who is visiting from California. Norman and Paul do not like Neal, but at Jessie's insistence they invite him to go fishing. Neal shows up drunk with Rawhide, a woman he met at a bar the night before. Norman and Paul decide to fish anyway and return to their car hours later to find that Neal and the woman have drunk all the beer and passed out naked in the sun.

Norman returns a painfully sunburned Neal home, where Jessie is waiting for them. She is angry that the brothers did not fish with Neal. Norman asks Jessie to drive him home, as he had brought Neal back in Neal's car, and he tells her that he is falling for her. She drives away angry but a week later asks Norman to come to the train station to see Neal off. After the train departs, Norman shows Jessie a letter from the University of Chicago: a job offer for an English Literature teaching position. Norman tells Jessie that he does not necessarily wish to leave and when it becomes clear that it's because of her - her face lights up and she quickly embraces him.

When Norman tells Paul about the job offer and marriage proposal, he urges Paul to come with him and Jessie to Chicago, concerned that Paul is making powerful enemies. Paul says that he will never leave Montana. Just before leaving for Chicago, Norman, Paul, and their father go fly fishing one last time. Paul catches a huge rainbow trout that drags him down the river through a set of rapids before he finally lands it. John proudly tells him what a wonderful fisherman he has become, and how he is an artist in the craft, much to Paul's delight. They pose for pictures with the huge fish.

Soon after the fishing excursion, Norman is called by the police, who tell him that Paul has been found beaten to death in an alley. Norman goes home and tells his parents the news. Years later, Mrs. Maclean, Norman, Jessie, and their two children listen to a sermon being given by John, who dies soon after.

The closing scene is of the elderly Norman, once again fishing on the same river, with director Robert Redford narrating the final lines from the original novella;

Of course now I'm too old to be much of a fisherman, and now I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. But when I'm alone in the half light of the canyon, all existence seems to fade to a being with my soul and memories, and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River, and the four-count rhythm, and a hope that a fish will rise. Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood, and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Cast[edit]

• Craig Sheffer as Norman Maclean
  • Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Young Norman Maclean
  • Arnold Richardson as Old Norman (narrator's voice by Robert Redford)
• Brad Pitt as Paul Maclean
  • Vann Gravage as Young Paul Maclean
• Tom Skerritt as Reverend John Maclean
• Brenda Blethyn as Clara Maclean
• Emily Lloyd as Jessie Burns
• Edie McClurg as Mrs. Burns
• Stephen Shellen as Neal Burns
• Nicole Burdette as Mabel, Indian woman
• Susan Traylor as Rawhide, woman with Neal
• Michael Cudlitz as Chub
• William Hootkins as Murphy

Production[edit]

Filming[edit]

Although both the book and movie are set in Missoula and on the Blackfoot River, it was filmed in late June to early July 1991 in south central Montana in Livingston and Bozeman,^[3] and on the nearby upper Yellowstone, Gallatin, and Boulder Rivers. The waterfall shown is Granite Falls in Wyoming.^[5][6] Filming was completed in early September 1991.

An article published in the Helena Independent Record in July 2000, based on recollections of people who knew both brothers, noted a number of specifics about the Macleans — notably various chronological and educational details about Paul Maclean's adult life — that differ somewhat from their portrayal in the film and novella.^[7]

Music[edit]

Mark Isham, who would go on to compose the scores to most Robert Redford-directed films, composed the musical score for the film. Originally, Elmer Bernstein was hired to score the film. However, after Redford and Bernstein disagreed over the tone of the music, Bernstein was replaced by Isham.^[8] Rushed for time, Isham completed the score within four weeks at Schnee Studio of Signet Sound Studios in Hollywood, CA. Upon release, the music was met with positive reviews earning the film both nominations for Grammy and Academy awards. The A River Runs Through It (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was released on October 27, 1992.^[9]

In some home video releases of the film, Elmer Bernstein is credited as the film's composer despite his score being rejected during post-production.

Release[edit]

It premiered at Bozeman, Montana, with a theatrical release on October 9 in the United States.^[10]

Home media[edit]

A River Runs Through It was originally released on VHS on May 19, 1993. It was released on DVD in 1999 and in a deluxe DVD edition in 2005.^[11] It was reissued on Blu-ray in July 2009 by Sony Pictures with six extra features including 17 deleted scenes and a documentary titled Deep Currents: Making 'A River Runs Through It' with interview segments of the cast and crew.^[12]

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

A River Runs Through It Audiobook Free

Released on October 9, 1992, the film grossed $43,440,294 in US domestic returns.^[2]

Critical response[edit]

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 80% based on 45 reviews, with an average rating of 6.79/10. The site's critics consensus reads: 'Tasteful to a fault, this period drama combines a talented cast (including a young Brad Pitt) with some stately, beautifully filmed work from director Robert Redford.'^[13] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating 'generally favorable reviews'.^[14] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of 'A–' on an A+ to F scale.^[15]

Much of the praise focused on Pitt's portrayal of Paul, which has been cited as his career-making performance.^[16] Despite the critical reception, Brad Pitt was very critical of his performance on the film: 'Robert Redford made a quality movie. But I don't think I was skilled enough. I think I could have done better. Maybe it was the pressure of the part, and playing someone who was a real person — and the family was around occasionally — and not wanting to let Redford down.'^[17]

Awards and honors[edit]

The film was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1993, including Best Cinematography (Philippe Rousselot); Best Music, Original Score (Mark Isham); and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Richard Friedenberg). Rousselot won for Best Cinematography. At the Golden Globes, Robert Redford was nominated for Best Director - Motion Picture, but did not win.

References[edit]

1. ^'AFI-Catalog'. catalog.afi.com. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
2. ^ ^ab'A River Runs Through It (1992)'. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
3. ^ ^abThompson, Toby (October 11, 1992). 'A River Runs Through It'. Washington Post. Retrieved April 28, 2013.
4. ^'A river runs through it'. Youtube.com. Retrieved March 17, 2019.
5. ^McMillion, Scott (June 20, 2003). 'Writers, professors read A River Runs Through It'. Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
6. ^A River Runs Through It filming locations. Archived October 26, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
7. ^Kidston, Martin J. (July 9, 2000). 'Paul MacLean in Helena'. Independent Record. Helena, Montana. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
8. ^'Filmtracks:A River Runs Through It (Mark Isham)'. Filmtracks.com. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
9. ^Mark Morton. 'A River Runs Through It [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]'. AllMusic. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
10. ^Festival Celebrates 25th Anniversary Of 'A River Runs Through It' - By JACKIE YAMANAKA, SEP 12, 2017
11. ^A River Runs Through It: Deluxe Edition | November 29, 2005
12. ^A River Runs Through It Blu-ray DigiBook | Sony Pictures | 1992 | 124 min | Jul 28, 2009
13. ^'A River Runs Through It Reviews'. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
14. ^'A River Runs Through It Reviews'. Metacritic. Retrieved December 10, 2020.
15. ^'Find CinemaScore'(Type 'River Runs Through It' in the search box). CinemaScore. Retrieved December 10, 2020.
16. ^Turan, Kenneth. 'Reverence Runs Deep in 'River''. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 30, 2012.
17. ^https://ew.com/movies/2011/09/16/brad-pitt-ew-interview/

External links[edit]

• A River Runs Through It on IMDb
• A River Runs Through It at the TCM Movie Database
• A River Runs Through It at AllMovie
• A River Runs Through It at the American Film Institute Catalog

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories is a semi-autobiographicalcollection of three stories by American author Norman Maclean (1902–1990) published in 1976. It was the first work of fiction published by the University of Chicago Press.

The collection contains the novella 'A River Runs Through It' and two short stories, 'Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim' and 'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky', which precede the events of the novella. It received widespread acclaim upon its publication and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the selection committee ultimately did not award the prize in that category that year. Two of the stories were later adapted into feature films.

'A River Runs Through It'[edit]

'A River Runs Through It' is a semi-autobiographical account of Maclean's relationship with his brother Paul and their upbringing in an early 20th-centuryMontana family in which 'there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.' Pete Dexter, in a 1981 profile of Maclean in Esquire magazine, described the novella:

It is a story about Maclean and his brother, Paul, who was beaten to death with a gun butt in 1938. It is about not understanding what you love, about not being able to help. It is the truest story I ever read; it might be the best written. And to this day it won’t leave me alone. I thought for a while it was the writing that kept bringing it around. That’s the way it comes back to me: I hear the sound of the words, then I see them happen. I spent four hours one afternoon picking out three paragraphs to drop into a column I was writing about the book, and in the end they didn’t translate, because except for the first sentence—'In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing'—there isn’t anything in it that doesn’t depend on what comes before it for its meaning.^[1]

As he describes his brother's alcoholism and gambling addiction, Maclean also explores how both afflictions have always followed the history of his family, even back to their earliest origins among Scottish Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians on the Isle of Mull.

The story is noted for using detailed descriptions of fishing and the Montana landscape to engage with a number of profound metaphysical questions.^[2] In a review for the Chicago Tribune, critic Alfred Kazin stated: 'There are passages here of physical rapture in the presence of unsullied primitive America that are as beautiful as anything in Thoreau and Hemingway'.^[3]

'Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'[edit]

'Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim' tells the story of Maclean working as a logger for the Anaconda Company at a logging camp on the Blackfoot River during the summer of 1928, when he was 25 and in graduate school. At the end of the previous summer working at the camp (1927), Maclean had made an arrangement to work the next summer with the camp's best logger, Jim Grierson.^[4] Maclean describes how Grierson would work the logging season at a camp, then find a town with a nice Carnegie Public Library, get a library card, find a whore, preferably from the South, and spend the off-season reading, drinking, and having a relationship with the prostitute.^[4]

'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky'[edit]

'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky' tells of part of the summer of Maclean's seventeenth year, 1919. He spent that summer, as he had the previous two, working for the United States Forest Service, this time at Elk Summit, Idaho, west of Blodgett Canyon and approximately 34 miles (55 km) walking distance almost due west-northwest of Hamilton, Montana, near White Sand Creek, and north of East Fork Moose Creek.^[5]

Working for the Forest Service in a very remote part of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in the Selway National Forest (now Clearwater National Forest), Maclean had to extinguish wildfires, build trails (with sledgehammer, chisel and dynamite), pack horses and mules, spend time alone on lookout duty at 7,424 feet (2,263 m) Grave Peak, and string telephone wire.^[5]

The Elk Summit Work Center is located at the junction of Horse Creek and Hoodoo Creek, north-northwest of Hoodoo Mountain and north-northeast of Hoodoo Lake, at 46°19′36″N114°38′51″W / 46.32667°N 114.64750°W (46.3265874, -114.6476053)^[6] and an elevation of 5,748 feet (1,752 m).

Publishing history[edit]

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was first published by the University of Chicago Press in May 1976, and has since been published in several formats: as a collection of short stories, bearing a title starting with that of the novella, and as a standalone novella, usually as an art book with many photographs or with many illustrations such as woodcuts. For much of its publishing history it was purposely not advertised, its publicity depending on word of mouth and critical mention. Talk of the 'never advertised' book generated a considerable amount of publicity.

A hardcover illustrated version issued in Chicago by the University of Chicago Press in 1989 with ISBN0-226-50060-8 is still in print. The anthology of short stories with the novella, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, was issued as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 with ISBN0-226-50066-7.

Pulitzer Prize[edit]

In 1977, the Pulitzer Prize committee for Fiction (a.k.a. 'fiction jury') recommended A River Runs Through It be awarded the prize for that year. The Pulitzer Prize Board, which has final say for awarding the prize, chose to override their recommendation and decided not to award for fiction that year.^[7]Pete Dexter wrote in 1981 that the jury called it 'a lean year for fiction' but speculated about their true reasons: 'I know just enough about the Pulitzer people to guess that what happened was that one of them noticed the trees too.'^[8]

River Runs Through It Meaning

Adaptations[edit]

A River Runs Through It[edit]

In 1992, Robert Redford directed a film of the same name starring Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, Tom Skerritt, Brenda Blethyn, and Emily Lloyd. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, with Philippe Rousselot winning for his cinematography. The film fueled a rise in the popularity of fly fishing for a number of years before the sport waned to previous levels.^[9]

The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky[edit]

'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky' was adapted into a 1995 ABCtelevision film titled The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky, also known simply as Hole in the Sky. The film was directed by John Kent Harrison, with the adaptation written by Robert Wayne, and stars Sam Elliott, Jerry O'Connell, Ricky Jay, and Molly Parker. It was filmed in British Columbia, Canada.^[10][11]

Others[edit]

A River Runs Through It Review

The following quote from the film version of A River Runs Through It, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago's United Center:

“At that moment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. He stood before us, suspended above the earth, free from all its laws like a work of art, and I knew, just as surely and clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.”^[12]

References[edit]

1. ^Dexter, Pete (23 March 2014) [June 1981]. 'The Old Man and the River'. Esquire. Retrieved 7 July 2014.
2. ^Cooper, David B. - 'Hooked on Fly-Fishing, Good Writing'. - Akron Beacon Journal. - August 12, 1990.
   —Reed, Leonard. - 'Filming the Beauty of Words'. - The Record. - October 13, 1992.
   —Judd, Ron. - 'Fishing Prose Hooks Readers'. - The Seattle Times. - April 13, 1995.
3. ^Kazin, Alfred. - 'Frontiers of True Feeling - Norman Maclean's Montana Classic'. - Chicago Tribune. - August 6, 1989.
4. ^ ^abMaclean, Norman (1992). - 'Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'. - A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. - New York, New York: Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster). - pp.115-135. - ISBN0-671-77697-5.
5. ^ ^abMaclean, Norman (1992). - 'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky'. - A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. - New York, New York: Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster). - pp.137-237. - ISBN0-671-77697-5.
6. ^'US Gazetteer files: 2010, 2000, and 1990'. United States Census Bureau. 2011-02-12. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
7. ^McDowell, Edwin (May 11, 1984). 'Publishing: Pulitzer Controversies'. NYtimes.com. Retrieved 2009-02-28.
8. ^DEXTER, PETE. 'The Old Man and the River | Esquire | JUNE 1981'. Esquire | The Complete Archive. Retrieved Dec 4, 2020.
9. ^Farris, Bruce. - 'Fly Fish is More Alluring Than Ever'. - The Fresno Bee. - September 30, 1993.
   —Niskanen, Chris. - 'Casting for Customers: Fly Fishing's Popularity is Waning'. - St. Paul Pioneer Press. - June 13, 1999.
   —Brasher, Bryan. - 'Movie Madness: Sport of Fly Fishing Receives Boost from Popular Movie, Book'. - Ledger-Enquirer. - December 30, 2001.
   —'How fly-fishing has changed since 'River Runs Through It'. - North Adams Transcript. - April 11, 2002.
10. ^The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky. - IMDb.
11. ^Lisk, Jamie. - 'The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky'Archived January 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. - CrankedOnCinema.com. - October 18, 2008.
12. ^'Statues | United Center'. www.unitedcenter.com. Retrieved Dec 4, 2020.

External links[edit]

• Excerpt from 'A River Runs Through It' - University of Chicago Press
• Norman Maclean: Of Scholars, Fishing and the River by John G. Cawelti

A River Runs Through It Audiobook Cover