I don't recall that much rain

TCM did a spotlight on Southern movies a couple of months back, and one of the movies where I might have seen the title before but never actually saw the movie was Baby the Rain Must Fall. So, as always, I made it a point to record it so I could watch later and do a post on it here.

Lee Remick plays Georgette, who at the start of the movie is on a bus with her daughter Margaret Rose, heading for the town of Columbus, Texas. An older woman gets on the bus, mainly so that we can have an expository scene in which the viewer understands that Georgette is going to Columbus to see her husband Henry (Steve McQueen) for the first time in years. Indeed, the young daughter claims she's never seen her father, which would be because he's been away in prison and Mom has been trying to protect Margaret from that uncomfortable fact.

Cut to Columbus, where we finally meet Henry. He fancies himself a singer, and has been performing rockabilly music in bars to try to get himself noticed, not that anybody is going to notice him in a place like this. And it's not as if he's thinking about his wife and daughter either. So with that in mind, Henry is quite surprised when his friend, local police officer Slim (Don Murray) takes Georgette and Margaret to see Henry.

Henry decides he's going to try to make a go of the marriage and the whole family thing, but of course he's got that past. He's a parolee who violently stabbed another man, but that's not the only thing in his past that's troubled. Henry's parents died young, and he was raised by an aging woman who is getting pretty close to the end of her life now. She beat young Henry pretty badly, and there's the old trope of children who were abused growing up to become violent themselves. Not only that, but she's got enough power that she could tell the authorities Henry has violated the terms of his parole.

So much of the movie develops slowly, with Henry getting a house just outside of town and not near anything and trying to raise a family, even getting a part-time job, but not getting anywhere fast. And things go quickly downhill when his foster mother dies....

Baby the Rain Must Fall is the sort of movie that's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. Not only is it a movie where there's not a whole lot happening, it's a movie with fairly difficult subject material as well as a fair bit of the sense of Southern gothic about it. Now, it's not as severe as the Tennessee Williams movies or something like Wise Blood, but those who don't care for the southern potboiler style, especially as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, are going to have some difficulty with the movie.

That having been said, the performances are all well done; it's just that you wish Baby the Rain Must Fall offered better material for everybody to be giving these performances. If this is the sort of material you're into, then you'll definitely like Baby the Rain Must Fall. If not, well, you've been warned.