The Rain People

Shirley Knight and James Caan in The Rain People

Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, from 1969, is a road movie that explores the byways of American alienation. Shirley Knight portrays a pregnant Long Island housewife who flees the milieu of a suffocating marriage to tour the country in her station wagon. She picks up a mentally disabled hitchhiker (James Caan) who proves difficult to jettison. She also attracts the attentions of a seemingly courtly policeman (Robert Duvall). The disparate strands of the plot eventually coalesce into tragedy.

After the relative disaster of his big budget musical Finian's Rainbow, The Rain People is an attempt by Coppola to craft a more intimate, personal film. The flick is influenced more by Antonioni than Minnelli. Coppola helps his three leads etch memorable performances, but his script, at times, feels hackneyed and derivative. The opening of the film, in which Knight untangles herself from her husband's embrace, lacks subtlety as a portrait of a woman leaving the suffocating cocoon of the suburbs. Similarly, when Caan's character starts freeing the animals at a roadside attraction where he has found work, the effect is all too reminiscent of Lennie and his rabbits in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: a ham-handed portrayal of an innocent far too noble for this wicked world.

Fortunately, the performances and Coppola's grace with the camera transcend these contrivances. As Roger Ebert noted at the time, the film is a "mirror image of Easy Rider" in that travelers search for both America and themselves. The Americana of the film's location shoots, a Veteran's Day parade in Chattanooga and a drive-in movie theater in West Virginia, linger in the mind's eye long after the machinations of the plot.