Following his American International Pictures stint with Dementia
13 and three films into his Warner Bros.-Seven Arts tenure beginning with You’re
a Big Boy Now and the Fred Astaire fantasy musical Finian’s Rainbow,
writer-director Francis Ford Coppola’s fourth venture into studio filmmaking became
his first sole effort not based on a preexisting work: the episodic 1969 road
movie The Rain People starring Shirley Knight, James Caan and the first
in a long series of collaborations with Robert Duvall.
Made after the big-budgeted and commercially
successful musical adaptation, it became the first American Zoetrope production
and release before offering George Lucas’ (who also worked on The Rain
People) debut THX 1138 and the career changing The Godfather for
Coppola. Though the frontrunner in an
extensive library of films, The Rain People for Coppola’s production
company and his own oeuvre is an intentionally small shoestring production
largely unknown to Coppola fans today.
Thanks to a new Warner Archive Blu-Ray disc and recent theatrical screening
at the Henry Ford Museum, Coppola’s littlest film is getting a second chance at
screen life in a big way.
Long Island based middle-class housewife Natalie Ravenna
(Shirley Knight) on a rainy morning sneaks out of the house while her husband
is sleeping and sets off on a soul-searching road trip in the family car, effectively
running away from home leaving her husband while making random pit stops along
the way to her dismayed parents’ house.
In between gas stations where she phones her husband to inform him she’s
pregnant, a detail we’re not sure of ourselves, she picks up a hitchhiker named
Jimmy “Killer” Kilgannon (James Caan), a former college football star who
sustained a debilitating head injury followed by $1K to exit the school.
On her sojourn, unsure of what to do with
Killer whether it means sleeping with him or dumping him off on someone else or
leaving him on the side of the road only to come back moments later, she meets
a highway patrolman named Gordon (Robert Duvall) who invites her to his trailer
where he lives as a widower with his young delinquent daughter. All the while, Natalie keeps phoning her
increasingly frustrated husband and finds herself fighting between all three
parties which invariably eventually breaks out in an all-out unintentional war
of her making.
Beginning ostensibly as a carefree road movie before
developing into a complicated character study ala Midnight Cowboy, Five
Easy Pieces, Scarecrow or Easy Rider, Francis Ford Coppola’s
scrappy gritty yet scenic The Rain People is a solid example of the
subgenre while being the first official 100% Coppola production. Shot over the course of five months across eighteen
states by future Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler with a shoestring crew
of ten people compounded with a somber road movie soundtrack by recurring Roger
Corman composer Ronald Stein, it originally emerged as a four-hour rough cut
before being honed into a shapely hour and forty-one minutes.
At times experimental with occasionally
hyperkinetic cutting by future The Godfather Part II editor Barry Malkin,
it forecasts in certain scenes the eventual emergence of a raw cinematic talent
as well as being perhaps the director’s most feminist film to date. Driven by a complicated female protagonist
played with grace and understatement by Shirley Knight who herself actually was
pregnant at the time with her second child, it goes against the grain with how
married female characters on film should be expected to behave. Furthermore, while we never meet (only hear)
her husband onscreen, her potential beau hang-arounds that get caught unintentionally
in her sticky needy web played by James Caan and Robert Duvall are both
excellent with Caan making the ex-football player a stupid-eyed ticking time
bomb and Duvall as the upstanding cop into a sexually frustrated brute.
Opening in August of 1969 where it went on to win the Golden
Shell at the 1969 San Sebastian Film Festival, The Rain People while
being a small movie that didn’t make a huge commercial splash was arguably
Coppola’s first real movie to garner praise from renowned critics like Roger
Ebert as the work of a wholly original American auteur. That he would follow this scrappy little road
movie up with one of the biggest screen epics of all time with The Godfather
is part in parcel to Coppola’s innate ability as a storyteller.
Though he has gotten as far away from his
initial impetus as humanly possible with his latest work, The Rain People is
a stark reminder of Coppola’s genius in a film that challenges norms and
expectations while also functioning as a road-movie slowly morphing into a
distinctly American tragedy. Previously
overlooked for decades until recent revival screenings and the newly restored
Warner Archive disc release, Coppola’s The Rain People marks the
director’s first true masterpiece and an early home run in what would develop
into a long and illustrious film career.
--Andrew Kotwicki