The Rain People (1969)

You won't be disappointed!

Touches You

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Quirky drama with three people with severe emotional problems are drawn together with tragedy occurring at film's end.Shirley Knight, much thinner, turns in a wonderful performance as the unbalanced Long Island housewife who leaves her husband when she finds out that she is pregnant. A totally unfulfilled, distraught woman, she tries to search out life's meaning when she picks up James Caan, an injured football college student, left as a mental vegetable by the accident, and summarily dismissed by the college. The film has a lot to say about how mentally challenged people are treated by society. Robert Duvall is the cop with much more on his mind than just giving the Knight character a speeding ticket.The performances are excellent by the repressed Knight, the slow Caan and the miserably unhappy widowed Duvall with a problem child daughter.

This is a great movie. This is a powerful. It's about people dealing with repressed emotions. It is about denial. It is about love. It is about an angry woman who falls in love with a brain-damaged ex-football player, and cannot accept the fact that she in love with such a man. It is about a traumatized police officer who denies his real feelings for his deceased wife. It is about the ex-football whose calm and pliable demeanor masks rage. This may be Francis Ford Coppola's greatest movie. It is unpretentious, it is real. The story is timeless; the themes relevant and compelling. A woman wants to break away from convention, and so flees. She is out of control, but maintains her sense of compassion. She wants love, desperately, and feels love too, but is too mixed up to sort out her thoughts, which remain jumbled in her mind. What she cannot admit is that the object of her love, the person for whom she really, truly cares for, is a man that is so far removed from what she considers to be one worthy of love, that it freaks her out. And this is the gist of the story: how people are so out of touch with how they feel that they cannot accept the truth even when it is right before their very eyes. She ran away from home, and came to the end of her journey, but too late. She wanted to be free but was unwilling to jettison all the bourgeois, middle-class junk that was keeping her enslaved. The character of Killer, played with great skill by James Caan, symbolizes the kind of man that contemporary society mocks and scorns - he is quiet, kind, loyal and strong without being pushy or bossy. Yet he is what the woman really wants, except that she cannot admit it, because of her own hang-ups, until it is too late. The strength of this story is contained in its honesty. The story and the characters are plausible and are not caricatures. It's just too bad that in this movie the truth is unpleasant, but if it were pleasant, then the movie would be hokum, and who needs that?

"The Rain People," an early Francis Ford Coppola film, features James Caan & Robert Duvall, two actors who would go on to star in the "Godfather" films. It tells the story of Natalie, a discontented housewife who wakes up one morning, leaves her husband and hits the road. Little information is given as to WHY Natalie has left, but even worse, no clue is given as to what she is looking for. She simply drifts away, calling her husband every few days to babble emotionally without communicating anything significant.Along the way she picks up hitchhiker Caan and police officer Duvall, two men who seem to interest her but clearly not enough for any emotional involvement. The best thing about this film is Coppola's use of flashback to fill in plot holes. As a character thinks or recalls an event, we jump cut back to visceral, hyper-real scenes that show us what no dialogue ever could... Natalie's dizzying wedding day, Caan's violent football games, and the death of Duvall's wife and son.Sadly, there's really nothing else going on here. Natalie is underdeveloped for a lead character, and it's difficult to feel anything for her. The movie ends in an inevitable violent encounter, and the story just stops. Three years later Coppola would direct "The Godfather," and render this movie null and void.GRADE: C

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!