The Rainmaker (1956)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Spoilers. Observations. Opinions.Great Kate. Katharine Hepburn is the greatest. Here she is, just a few years after portraying the passenger of that African Queen, opposite that gritty, grimy Humphrey Bogart.Kate is wearing dresses here. This goes against her real life stereotype-shattering slacks, pants, man-clothes or whatever you want to call her personal wardrobe.Kate is Lizzie. Lizzie is a worn out spinster, wishing to be a Cinderella who is swept off her feet by a handsome prince from la-la land. She has romantic yearnings for a local snooze-fest, but he looks pretty boring to me.Voila! Along comes Burt Lancaster, portraying Starbuck. I immediately think, nowadays, of Starbuck's, the coffee purveyor. Anyway, this film's Starbuck is a dashing, swashbuckling snake oil salesman who says things like the stars shine for old maid Lizzie. Who else but Lancaster can play Starbuck? Starbuck is a loudmouth, wonderful, screaming and yelling dream come true, or so he thinks in his own mind.Awesome Burt. Burt Lancaster ain't no (bad English on purpose here) hard-boiled Spencer Tracy or dashing Cary Grant, but he is hubba-hubba in a very exciting way. Baby, the rain must fall, and neither Tracy nor Grant could ever have pulled it off.Lizzie is swept off her feet. The boring local guy is left covered by all of the dust in Starbuck's road. Katharine Hepburn, you have done it again. You have played many types of characters, and of course opposite several well known male lead actors. Starbuck, however, is one I remember very well. He is that sexy, risk-taking dreamer whom a woman really wants, deep down. A woman doesn't want to spend the rest of her life with a wrung-out old dishrag.Yes, the rainmaker makes the rain fall, in buckets as a matter of fact. Buckets the size of a house. This rainfall is huuuuuuuge. Starbuck (Lancaster) has made his prediction come true. He proceeds to sing, scream and yell that the rainfall has finally occurred. This is such a memorable scene.

I absolutely love this production! Missed it in the movie theatre so long ago, and was delighted when it was released on DVD. This version of the Broadway play was perfectly cast with an ensemble of wonderful actors who delivered well of their individual roles.Nobody could do it better than Burt Lancaster, as he was always bigger than life itself--a true Hollywood star! Katharine Hepburn acquitted the role of Lizzie perfectly, as well. Young Earl Holliman made a great enthusiastic younger brother and Lloyd Bridges the stern and controlling older brother was fine, too.The only change I would desire would be to film it on location, as it was so obviously filmed on a sound stage or back lot; however, back when it was produced, only really big budget movies were filmed elsewhere.What I liked most was the recurrent theme that ran through the entire story--the importance of believing in oneself. That theme touched all of the cast except for Lizzie's father and the nearby aging town sheriff. All in all, this is a warm-hearted family movie with a little comedy sprinkled over it for good measure. Sit back and enjoy the stars of the past and the good side of Hollywood.

There are films that age well, and there are films that age very well, so well in fact that they almost feel timeless somehow, because everything works so perfectly or near perfectly that the film feels flawless. This is not one of those films. Based on the stage play of the same name, which was loosely based on a real man, "The Rainmaker", directed by its own original stage handler Joseph Anthony, is the story of a, ahem, "plain" woman in danger of becoming an old maid, Lizzie Curry (Katharine Hepburn), her unrequited love for the town sheriff (Wendell Corey), her dysfunctional family (father H.C. played by Cameron Prud'Homme and "big brothers" the overbearing Noah played by Lloyd Bridges and Jim played by Earl Holliman, who somehow won an award for his obnoxious performance) and their encounter with a dashing, charismatic con man known as Bill Starbuck (Burt Lancaster, in what feels like a prototype for his Oscar winning role in "Elmer Gantry") who, ahem, helps Lizzie become "a real woman" unleashing her, um, true beauty or some such. He even manages to get it to rain during their drought. Overlong, slow pacing, and obvious inexperienced direction of a motion picture film (vs the live stage) result in an awkward, unpleasant soap opera that could've been better had it focused on either just the dysfunctional family or the social ramifications of the con man's effect on the town during the drought, also not helped by the very old fashioned, outdated ideology of its core characters, despite how hard it tries to be a sensitive examination of the hopes and dreams of regular people. One of the film's biggest sins is the miscasting of Katharine Hepburn as the "PLAIN PLAIN PLAIN!" Lizzie. The first obvious flaw is that Hepburn, who was pushing 50 at the time, is clearly too old for the character (everyone reacts to her as if she still has time to start a family of her own, which she very much wants), making it all the more awkward if not outrightly bizarre to watch a middle aged woman grapple with adolescent issues, as well as off setting a number of her scenes with other characters - she's supposed to be the daughter of Prud'Homme but looks and feels like she should be his wife (he was only 14 years older than Hepburn in real life - a case where an actor couldn't pull it off) and instead of a young woman full of sexual frustration in her scenes with Lancaster she feels like she should be the widow he takes advantage of. Then there's the idea that Hepburn was so ungodly unattractive that she could only ever be "PLAIN!" (which everyone, especially Bridges, keeps saying as if what they really mean is ugly), when even a middle aged Hepburn still had some beauty about her. I couldn't help being reminded of Kate's role in "Bringing Up Baby" where she also played a woman hung up on a man, and she felt just as miscast there as she does here. Perhaps some of it was her real life personality shining through, but the boy/man crazy types were never her strong suit. The other actors do what they can (Holliman is downright unbearable and will have the audience cheering every time he gets hit), but in the end the best thing about this film is Burt Lancaster. Some accuse him of being a large ham here, but at least his natural go for broke energy and charisma brings some much needed life to the dull proceedings, and he also manages to show his subtle side in his scenes with Hepburn. It's a shame these two iconic stars - both well known for their fiery, sometimes frightening personalities off camera - didn't have a better film, but in the end the film is worth a rental for their scenes together. But only for a rental.

Based on a Richard Nash play and directed by Joseph Anthony, "The Rainmaker" stars Katharine Hepburn as an ageing spinster who's unluckiness with love have led to her becoming bitter, callous, cynical and skeptical of men. Mirrored to Hepburn is Starbuck, a character played by Burt Lancaster. He's a charming conman who promises - for a fee of course - to bring rain to the drought inflicted farmlands of superstitious suckers.The film delights in clashing Starbuck's optimism with Hepburn's pessimism. It's larger point, though, is that Hepburn's pessimism is both the result of her fierce intelligence and masks a deep, optimistic yearning. She's a hopeless romantic, always believes, is the film's true optimist, whilst it is Starbuck who cynically exploits others and has no faith in his abilities to conjure up rain. The film's end, of course, espouses a healthy merging of both stances.Today "The Rainmaker" is mocked for its wild, hysterical acting. It's a good example of a certain "type" of acting, though, and Hepburn's performance here was once frequently used to teach young theatre actors. Lancaster, meanwhile, is as over-the-top as always, his character imbued with the same manic energy which made his early action/adventure movies so memorable. Yes everyone in the film (Lloyd Bridges, Hepburn, Lancaster) is too old for their roles, the film's too theatrical, too on-the-nose, but Nash's script goes into some dark places, and scenes in which Hepburn lays bare her insecurities regarding her plain body, her fears of loneliness, her acceptance of her own virginity, are shockingly frank. Elsewhere the film does well to show how superstition and a kind of grim logic tend to both operate in the same space and facilitate each another. Starbuck's superstitions mask his weaknesses, his insecurity, his disbelief, whilst Hepburn's cold logic masks her longings, her fantasies, her private delusions. The film is ridiculously heavy-handed, but in its theatricality is able to sketch out regions which most art can't.7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.