Robert Mulligan (1965)
The triumvirate of Robert Mulligan, Horton Foote and Alan Pakula, after their success with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), teamed up again for this unsatisfying but oddly touching film. The opening credits of Baby the Rain Must Fall announce that it’s based on a play by Foote called The Traveling Lady. The movie begins with Georgette Thomas, young daughter Margaret Rose on her knee, travelling on a bus to a new place and stage of her life. It’s therefore a pretty safe bet that the film will end with Georgette moving on elsewhere. And so it does, although the significance of the final sequence – thanks to Don Murray, as the local lawman who drives Georgette and Margaret Rose en route to somewhere else – is more interestingly uncertain than you might expect or, perhaps, than Horton Foote intended. At the start, Georgette is travelling to be reunited with her husband Henry, just released from jail, but still on parole, for stabbing a man – he’s been inside long enough never to have seen his daughter until now. As an orphan, the boy Henry was taken in by a spinster called Miss Kate, who still dominates his life. Henry is the lead singer and plays guitar in a rockabilly band that performs in local bars and he wants a career as a musician. Miss Kate wants him to ‘go back to school’ (although he’d be a rather mature student). The setting here is small-town Texas rather than Alabama but, as with Mockingbird, Mulligan realises the locale very well, with the help of Ernest Laszlo’s photography and Roland Anderson’s art direction. The large, white skies that dominate the parched mundanity of the landscape and the people in it are resonant. The film has elements of Southern Gothic – the look of Miss Kate’s house and housekeeper, the adjacent cemetery and Henry’s climactic, knife-wielding desecration of his callously charitable guardian’s grave – but Horton Foote doesn’t have a Gothic appetite. He has a penchant – and, although his approach is emotionally limited, a talent – for tidily dramatising the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, for revealing them to be extraordinary.
Unquestionably a star, Steve McQueen wasn’t a bad actor either yet, whenever he’s making efforts to act seriously, the starlight dims. Henry Thomas – a free spirit with a guilty conscience – is terrified of being sent back to ‘the pen’. When he wakes from a nightmare that he has been returned there, Henry sits on his bed as Georgette tries to reassure him and McQueen, locked into Henry’s bad dream, is mesmerising. At a moment like this you’re not conscious of McQueen projecting anything; you seem to be looking into him and he’s fascinating to watch. But when he consciously interprets Henry, McQueen seems dutiful, uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure from reading the BFI programme note whether he’d done his own singing: even if he had (according to IMDB his voice was dubbed by someone called Billy Strange), I think he might have given the impression of miming because he acts singing too strenuously. There’s no connection either between McQueen and Lee Remick as Georgette. Remick is an intelligent, conscientious actress but she’s bland. Georgette has a sweet, melancholy quality but she lacks poignancy because the unassailably ladylike Lee Remick isn’t able to suggest that this young woman’s beauty and resilience have survived through force of will and against the odds. The best acting comes from Don Murray, as Henry’s boyhood friend Slim, now a childless, grieving widower and the deputy sheriff. Murray conveys Slim’s loneliness subtly but powerfully: sadness seems to have taken over every inch of his tall, thin body; his voice, when he tries to strike up friendly conversation, seems to be coming from a long way away – from another, lost world. He wears his sheriff’s hat in most scenes: it’s the effect of his removing it – and the fact that we can see his face out of hiding and sense someone edging back into life – that gives that last sequence in the car its ambiguous impact.
Robert Mulligan occasionally undoes good work by clumsy underlining. Henry helps his daughter to plant a chinaberry tree – or the beginnings of a chinaberry tree – in the earth outside the place where he, Georgette and Margaret Rose are living. When you see the chinaberry in the corner of the frame, it’s affectingly fragile; Mulligan kills the effect by presenting its vulnerability as a central image, as Henry’s unhappy ending approaches. Mulligan also appears to have orchestrated the supporting players to be a shade overemphatic. Kimberly Block (in her only screen role, according to IMDB) is natural and affecting as Margaret Rose but the adults are too theatrically alert to be fully believable creatures of the world they inhabit. You get this right from the start as an elderly woman strikes up a conversation with Georgette on the bus: Zamah Cunningham is too eager – as a performer – to start chatting, although she quickly establishes a character. The same is true, in somewhat larger roles as local women, of Carol Veazie and Ruth White – they’re incisive and entertaining but their every look and line reading is prepared, nothing is spontaneous. Given the conception of the character, it’s hardly surprising that this is even more the case with Georgia Simmons as Miss Kate but Estelle Hemsley is good as her housekeeper. Paul Fix is the local judge; according to IMDB, Henry’s band includes an uncredited Glen Campbell. The title song, with words by Ernie Sheldon and music by Elmer Bernstein (who also wrote the film’s score), is slightly intriguing heard in snatches but boring when it’s fully performed. Even so, Wikipedia reports that Glenn Yarbrough’s version of it reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.
12 August 2010
