The Rain People
Francis Ford Coppola (1969)
Worth seeing because of who made it, and when, but The Rain People doesn’t work. This was Francis Ford Coppola’s fourth feature; his fifth was The Godfather (1972). You’re on the lookout for clues to, foreshadowing of, what came next – you perk up during a brief flashback to a family’s wedding celebration. The two main men’s roles are taken by actors who would be key members of the Corleone clan, James Caan and Robert Duvall. But The Rain People – seemingly for its writer-director as well as for the audience – becomes a wild-goose chase for dramatic confidence and purpose.
This is a road movie in which the journey lacks momentum and the sluggish progress isn’t only because of the protagonist’s indecision although there’s no denying that Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight) is an unsure traveller. Rising early one morning in her Long Island home, she leaves her husband Vinny (Robert Modica) asleep in bed, then calls in on her parents (Sally Gracie and Alan Manson). She tells them – and Vinny, when she phones later that day – that she doesn’t know how long she’ll be gone but needs time to think and be alone. Natalie is pregnant with the couple’s first child, news that thrills her husband but seems to dismay her. Driving west, she isn’t on the road for long before she gives a lift to a hitchhiker, Jimmy Kilgannon (James Caan). She tells him her name is Sarah. He tells her, truthfully it seems, that his nickname is ‘Killer’, that he was a college football star until he sustained a serious head injury on the field of play. Natalie’s false name may symbolise her desire for an identity different from the entirely domestic one by which she now feels threatened and overwhelmed. Jimmy’s nickname picks up on his actual surname and presumably his footballing prowess but is otherwise (thank goodness) a misnomer. He’s one of those characters whose impaired brain is a quasi-romantic proof of innocence. Despite his physical strength, he’s not even, unlike Frankenstein’s monster or Lennie in Of Mice and Men, an unwitting homicide. This Killer is a thoroughgoing victim.
Natalie, at first, exploits his harmlessness. They stop off at a motel on their first night together. In her room, Natalie tells Killer what to do, including take his top off. But that’s as far as she goes: she admits that she gave him a ride in her car with a one-night stand in mind then sends him back to his own room in the motel. This young man, with the mental age of a child, turns into someone for whom Natalie, plagued by divided feelings about actual motherhood, can show a quasi-maternal responsibility. She drives him to visit his former girlfriend (Laurie Crews) and her parents (Andrew Duncan and Marion Fairchild) but they want nothing to do with him. She gets him a job with a man (Tom Aldredge) prepared to exploit Killer as heartlessly as the animals that he keeps in gruesome conditions. More than once, Natalie is exasperated by Killer’s impulsive behaviour and drives off, leaving him at the roadside, before changing her mind. One time, she’s anxious enough to make a quick getaway and is stopped for speeding by traffic patrolman Gordon (Robert Duvall). Natalie’s angry at first but the conversation soon turns more amiable. They go to a diner together. Gordon lightens up enough to do jokey moves on his motorcycle as Natalie drives behind him on the highway. As night falls, though, the mood darkens. Natalie goes back to the trailer that widowed Gordon shares with his young daughter Rosalie (Marya Zimmet). It soon becomes clear that he’s physically violent with the child. He sends Rosalie outside so that he and Natalie can have sex; just as he does so, Killer happens to wander into the trailer park. When Natalie decides she doesn’t want sex and screams as Gordon prepares to rape her, Killer bursts into the trailer and beats Gordon up. Rosalie grabs her father’s gun and shoots Killer dead.
By coincidence, I’d just started reading Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (first published in 1974) when I saw The Rain People. Not only does Coppola’s film seem to vindicate Haskell’s critique of modern male directors’ tendency to trade in female stereotypes; Coppola virtually admits as much in the Sight and Sound (Autumn 1972) piece which BFI used as their handout for this month’s screenings of The Rain People. In the S&S interview, Coppola tells Stephen Farber:
‘I’m very interested in women in films. I’d like to write and make films about women, and I have some ideas. Maybe some of them are very romantic. But there’s a kind of feminine, magical quality, dating back to the Virgin Mary or something I picked up in catechism classes, that fascinates me …’
Although he then adds that ‘I think I’ve always been empathetic enough to put myself in a woman’s place’, The Rain People – precisely because the central character is female – is evidence that Coppola naturally tended to write about men rather than woman. Molly Haskell, without being harshly critical of the film, rightly notes that Natalie’s ‘cross-country quest eventually belongs less to her than to the men she meets’.
At least, though, Coppola is trying, however unsuccessfully, to explore the exasperated perspective of a young American housewife on the cusp of motherhood. In any case, the male characters here are not inspired creations – Killer especially. It’s he who gives the film its title in a fey little speech triggered by raindrops falling on Natalie’s car windscreen. (‘The rain people’ of Killer’s melancholy imagination ‘are people made of rain. They only cry. They disappear altogether because they cry themselves away’.) It’s he who, within a few hours of starting work for the nasty zookeeper, wreaks havoc by releasing rabbits, chickens and other birds from their cages. Killer comes over as a sentimental, secondhand concoction – one that Coppola has put together from books that he’s read, plays or movies that he’s seen.
James Caan gives a committed performance in the role, though, and Robert Duvall, in the smaller part of Gordon, is impressive. There’s a reason beyond Coppola’s writing why Natalie is unconvincing and that’s the actress playing her. Natalie’s unstable moods and uncertain actions seem less an expression of her personality than of Shirley Knight’s trying out various attitudes, one after another. The Rain People is showing as part of BFI’s ‘Wanda and Beyond’ season but Knight gives an impression very different from Barbara Loden’s interpretation of her title character – an anti-heroine who felt authentically aimless. Coppola is interestingly candid in the S&S interview with Stephen Farber about what went wrong. He had wanted to make a picture with Knight and told her he would write one for her. In the event, though, ‘I don’t think Shirley Knight trusted me. … Whenever an actor starts to distrust the director, he begins to do two things – he’s acting and he’s also watching out for himself’.
In retrospect, Coppola can’t have been too sorry that The Rain People failed – commercially at least. He wasn’t Paramount’s first choice to direct The Godfather but Robert Evans, the studio’s head of production, was sure that he wanted an Italian American for the job. Evans’ assistant Peter Bart suggested Coppola, who fitted the bill not just ethnically but also because ‘he would work for a low sum and budget after the poor reception of The Rain People‘ (Wikipedia). Although Coppola wasn’t keen on Mario Puzo’s novel, he needed work – and a payday – to finance film projects that he really wanted to pursue. So he decided to take the job.
17 June 2025