Quite a few months back TCM ran a night of road movies, including the new-to-me The Rain People. I had put off watching it for some time after watching Number One, because I didn't want to do two football-themed movies in close succession. Recently, I finally got around to watching The Rain People to do a post on it.
Shirley Knight plays Natalie Ravenna, a housewife from Long Island who drives off from home one day and goes west, probably not to grow up with the country but because she has to figure out a lot of problems. She's left behind a husband and, as we later learn, she's pregnant and thinking of getting an abortion, an extremely controversial topic for the late 1960s.
Somewhere out on the road she passes a hitchhiker, stopping to pick up the youngish man. That man is Kilgannon (James Caan), nicknamed Killer in part because of his surname, and in part because he was a college football player with a hard-nosed style of playing. So hard-nosed, in fact, that nowadays everybody would hold him up as an example of CTE, but in those days they really only thought about dementia pugilistica in terms of boxing. Killer has brief flashbacks to his college days. In any case, now that he can't play football anymore, the college responded first by giving him a make-work job doing some of the landscaping like raking leaves, and then giving him $1000 as a parting gift.
Natalie is turned on by Killer, but as she gets to know him more she begins to understand more about his brain damage. So she'd like to get rid of him, preferably by getting him a job with somebody. She can barely handle her own life; how can she handle his? Thankfully, Killer had an old girlfriend who's father had offered him a job back in his college days, so Natalie takes Killer there. Unfortunately, the girlfriend doesn't want Killer any more now that he's got his brain injury, and is very vocal about it.
On again further west, as Natlie tries to find herself and tries to find a job for Killer. They stop in a small town in Nebraska where there's a farmer with a "reptile ranch" and a bunch of chickens, and it would be Killer's job to do all the dirty odd jobs around the place. Natalie realizes that the farmer is exploiting Killer for his $1000, but is at the point where she just wants to get the hell out of town.
She gets out so fast that the local cop Gordon (Robert Duvall) pulls her over for speeding and makes her drive back into town to pay the fine. The two get to talking. Gordon has some sympathy for Natalie, as he'd lost a wife he didn't really love in a house fire, and lost an infant son. He's got a daughter about to enter puberty, and she's hell to raise without a mother around. Gordon invites Natalie back to his trailer, and....
The Rain People is one of those movies that's really more about the characters than their stories. As such, some people might have some problems with the movie and its narrative structure. It doesn't help that all of the characters have enough personal problems that it would be easy not to have much sympathy for them. Thankfully, however, we get three pretty darn good acting performances from the leads, more than making up for the narrative flaws. The other positive is the location shooting, as director Francis Ford Coppola directed on the road over several months on a tight budget. The authentic locations are much more authentic than anything Hollywood's studio system would have given us just a few years earlier.
The Rain People isn't perfect by a long shot. But it's ultimately compelling, and absolutely worth a watch.
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