Jean Renoir's The River

All right, I saw Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), and liked it.  I saw The Rules of the Game (1939), and liked it.  So I was looking forward to The River (1951):

What a massive disappointment!  I gave up after about half an hour.  I can't remember the last time I gave up on a film so quickly.  I guess maybe when it was first released, four years after India's independence, it gave Western audiences a nostalgic romanticized view of a recent colonial past, in pretty technicolor, that may have had a certain appeal.  But the dialogue is clichéd, the acting wooden, and the whole scenario pretty cringe-inducing.  If I have an hour and a half spare, I'd rather spend it looking at something that Jean Renoir's father cooked up seventy years earlier, in 1881:

 ...for more on the "Luncheon of the Boating Party," click here.