The Rain People

This early Coppola work is overlong and erratic, but it is not devoid of praiseworthy qualities. The cinematography is excellent and the characters are memorable. James Caan is very convincing as the mentally handicapped hitchhiker. Also, because this film was shot on location all over the Eastern U.S., it offers an interesting, authentic look at America in the late 1960's. The title phrase does not have a significant meaning in the overall story, but only comes up during a conversation between the two lead characters (Caan and Shirley Knight). The way Coppola develops the characters by using short, dream-like flashbacks is very clever. In general, this film is not in the same class as Coppola's later work, but it's a solid character-driven story.

Early Coppola with sublime cast that most folks never got to see (a pity). There's some wonderful things going on in this one - Shirley Knight's best performance (an underrated actress), a road trip in the late 1960's, James Caan very restrained and moving, Robert Duvall in a part he was born to play (edgy, lonely, motorcycle cop), and a touching script with F. Coppola behind the wheel.

If this had been made five years LATER by some nobody, it would have been a smash (so much for timing). Anyway, I recommend this to all people who don't need outer-space explosions and bad mother-in-law jokes or a billion dollar budget to sit for a few hours and watch a story unfold. Give this one a chance if you can find it!

Five years earlier and I doubt the movie could have found a distributor. It's slow, contemplative, and nothing much happens until the end. But for those who follow inner conflict as well as outer, it's a stunner. Pregnant suburban wife Knight hits the road, fleeing a consuming marriage. But she's not just fleeing, she's also aimlessly searching—note how she first bypasses Caan before hazily backing up. Trouble is Caan's brain damaged, and in need of adult supervision. Now Knight's in a pickle. On one hand, her budding maternal instinct kicks in; on the other, a grown child is too much what she's fleeing from. Thus, the confusion of her life mounts. But hey, she meets macho cop Duvall who's got adventure written all over him. Yet he turns out to be domineering and mean, probably too much like the husband she's abandoned. This leads up to an ending that is both touching and ironic.

For expansive post-war couples the suburbs were liberating; but a generation later and younger folks like Knight felt confined. This is a 60's road picture feminine style. When Americans get restless or unhappy, they head westward in frontier tradition. So why shouldn't a woman, even when alone and vulnerable. The acting here is outstanding, and it better be since character carries the story or what there is of it. I really like Caan who shows why less is sometimes more. And get a load of those desolate roadsides, no cosmetic Hollywood here. Too bad the film's so obscure in the Coppola canon. All in all, it's a telling reflection of a restless time, perhaps even of what some call the human condition. However, I can understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea, and certainly a long way from Coppola's next, The Godfather (1972).

In some scenes in the Rain People, Francis Ford Coppola's precursor to his hey-day of the seventies, there is the mark of a similar situation to 1969's Easy Rider, but not exactly in the same reference frame. Here we have a drama about disconnected people from society, in some ways alienated by the choices or by limits imposed by one mean or another. It's one of those rare original dramas where some scenes stand alone as total knockouts.

Even with such a low-string budget and a very freewheeling, so to speak, attitude about filming the movie, Coppola is able to capture everything that needs to be said through these clearly defined characters and the curved, unexpected degrees of one character versus the helplessness of another, or vice versa, or both. And, as one might be inclined seeing as how it is very much about the cutaways of suburban life of the 1960s, it has that escapism of the film mentioned before, but of a more concrete, near timeless quality with the drama and the underlying issues. In a way, if Bergman were on route as a quasi-guerrilla 20-something filmmaker out to get the strange truths of everyday outsiders, this might be it.

But along with all of the very direct and sometimes self-conscious photography (though also with a more documentary approach at times, akin with its indeterminable characters), the actors all fit into place. Shirley Knight, an actress I'm not too familiar with, has a complex, diverging role as a pregnant wife running off in a sort of existentialist conundrum of what life is there to have. There are moments of some awe-inspiring acting by her, and one of my favorites (if not my favorite) is when she is on the telephone calling her husband the first time. Such a tense scene on both ends, and in every small gesture and inflection of a word so much about her is spoken with so little.

It's extraordinary in ways that mirror others in Coppola's films. Then comes in the character of 'killer' played by James Caan. This, too, is a dangerous character to take on, as it is a mix of childish bewilderment and amusement with scarred memories. Think Forrest Gump if he didn't make it past the football and wit. It's one of his best, actually, by being the most minimalist- for a guy who's usually playing tough guys in movies, here's one that also is part of the crux of the story and of Knight's character. Also very good in a supporting role is Robert Duvall as a cop with a rough side and rather checkered past; kind of an early sample of other defected characters he would play later on in his career.

So the characters, and what Coppola risks in having an uneasiness running in them, are really what make up the film, as whatever story there is it is definitely not resolved in the usual way you might think or expect. The last ten or so minutes are like others in Coppola's work, where the specific tragedies on all sides are undercut by the emotional- and psychological- implications this will leave on the principles are amplified to the sublime and sad.

This is, for its time, brave on the part of what is trying to be represented (in both the freedom as well as the flaws and ambiguities) in the subject matter. And the style of the picture adds a fragmented kind of view onto it all with quick flashbacks that are graphic and self-contained in a contrast with the longer shots in some crucial scenes. It's a road movie of its period, but its also got a lot more working than it would under another filmmaker with less chances to take on the nature of these outcast characters. One of the best films of 1969.

Of all his films it would appear that Francis Ford Coppola is particularly fond of "The Rain People", a very modest and some might say 'arty' drama he made early in his career. Like a lot of American films popular at the time it's a 'road movie' with Shirley Knight as the young wife who ups and leaves her husband in the middle of the night, gets in her car and drives West for no paricular reason she can think of, meeting on her journey James Caan, (brain-damaged football player), and Robert Duvall, (randy motorcycle cop). She also happens to be pregnant and, like so many Americans in movies at the time, has gone off to 'find herself'.

Coppola says it was a personal project and there are some people who think it's his first masterpiece but it wasn't a hit and despite Coppola's name on the credits has become something of a lost movie. Knight is excellent as she mopes about and, you might say, teasing any man who comes her way while Duvall and especially Caan match her at every turn. You could say it's a quintessential American film of its time, a 'movie-brat' movie if there ever was one and Coppola's first real 'signature' picture, (though I do have a soft-spot for the wonderful "Finian's Rainbow" which preceeded it). If you do get a chance to track this down it is certainly well worth seeing.