One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.”

When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. It is the film's best achievement that it communicates that message with such feeling.The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” ( Chicago Tribune). Instead, they understand that the Reverend Maclean's lessons were about how to behave no matter what life brings about how to wade into the unpredictable stream and deal with whatever happens with grace, courage and honesty. Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

Leave out the principles, and all you have left are some interesting people who are born, grow up, and take various directions in life. They are only illustrations for underlying principles. It is not really about the events that happen in it. This must have been a very difficult movie to write. As the boys grow up, they meet young ladies, and date, and consider their futures, and Redford elaborates on the book in ways which flesh out the characters of Paul and his mother, and some of the people in their lives, including a young Indian woman Paul dates in defiance of town opinion, and the high-spirited Jessie, ( Emily Lloyd), who eventually becomes Norman's wife. The towns uneasily straddle the divide between the modern and the frontier. The movie was shot on locations that suggest the bounty of the Western states in those days. But it is Paul who is the better fly fisherman, and who, at least one day, is perfect at what he did.

Norman has more serious aspirations he wants to teach literature. Now make it half as long.' Brad Pitt is the younger brother, Paul, an impetuous, golden-haired free spirit who drinks too much and gets in card games, and wants nothing more than to stay in Montana all of his life, working for a newspaper. The movie stars Craig Sheffer as Norman, the older son, more serious, learning to write by taking his papers in to his father's study, invariably to be told, 'Good. Redford's film version makes the crucial decision to keep Maclean's voice in the film his own prose is read as a narration, by Redford, so that we do not simply see events as they happen, we are reminded that they are memories from long ago, and that the author has spent time and trouble to draw the lessons from them.

Author of a river runs through it