“My romantic idea is to be part of an American New Wave,” Francis Ford Coppola told an interviewer in 1972, perhaps defensively in the wake of the monumental, mainstream success of The Godfather. And as if to prove the point, his next film would be the beyond-uncompromising New Hollywood masterpiece The Conversation (his price for agreeing to make The Godfather Part II). But Ford’s New Wave bona-fides had been well established, notably with his 1969 effort The Rain People, which premiered on August 27 of that year. (Coppola also embraced a nouvelle vague ethos by parlaying his early successes – he had a critical and commercial hit with You’re a Big Boy Now in 1966 – to support the efforts of other emerging filmmakers, including George Lucas, whose first two, ambitious films, THX-1138 and American Graffiti, would have unlikely reached production without Coppola’s backing.)
The Rain People is as New Wavey as it gets: small, personal, wandering, unlikely to please (and uninterested in doing so), the movie emphasizes character over plot, and was produced in the company of a like-minded cohort of collaborators on both sides of the camera. Cinematographer Bill Butler would shoot The Conversation (as well as notable seventies films Drive, He Said and Hickey and Boggs); editor Barry Malkin would work with Coppola seven more times; other regulars involved in the production included sound editing wizard Walter Murch (who co-wrote THX with Lucas and would be an indespensible creative partner on The Conversation and Apocalypse Now).
Coppola’s film is set into action by the unexpected flight of its protagonist, Natalie (Shirley Knight), a young woman suddenly in the throes of reexamining her roles as a wife (and potentially a mother)—concerns on the minds of many in the late 1960s as the women’s movement emerged (the groundbreaking women’s march for equality would take place exactly one year later). “I used to wake up and begin my day, and now it belongs to you,” she tells her blindsided husband, in a collect call from somewhere on the Pennsylvania turnpike. If this movie is about anything (and it is), it is about that sentence.
And so Natalie hops in the station wagon on Long Island, and two tunnels later she’s off to America—The Rain People is a road picture. Similarly, Coppola, cast, and crew loaded into five cars and embarked on an odyssey across eighteen states, shooting on location and on the fly, at times surreptitiously inserting the players in real situations (such as the Armed Forces Day parade in Tennessee). Knight, just off a key supporting role in Richard Lester’s Petulia, carries the film, and the performance is a challenging one—Natalie is confused and not exactly sure what she’s looking for, as she is running from something, not towards any clearly defined goal. Importantly, The Rain People makes clear that she is not so much running from her husband (he actually seems like a decent fellow, struggling in their long-distance exchanges to comprehend what has gone wrong and searching for ways to make it right)—rather, she is fleeing marriage, or, more generally, the confines of the social roles, however comfortable, that society has designated for her.
The road, however, offers no miracle cures. Intrigued by the prospect of sexual freedom, Natalie comes across two prospects, hitchhiking former college jock Kilgannon (James Caan) and Nebraska Highway Patrolman Gordon (Robert Duvall). But Kilgannon, let go from school in the wake of a traumatic head injury, turns out to be less one-night-stand material and more, in his child-like vulnerability and dependence, the sort of unwanted (and difficult to shed) responsibility that Natalie is running from. Gordon, a somewhat more plausible prospect, comes with his own complications, as people in real life tend to.
Characteristically for a New Hollywood production, The Rain People does not come to a tidy conclusion; it’s one of those “we’re going to stop filming here and roll the credits,” kind of a movie. (Also characteristically, you won’t leave the theater cheering.) Ultimately it is a small film, and need not be overpraised. As Roger Ebert put it in his perceptive review, “That’s the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they’d rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.” Coppola, risking his own money and eager to break out of the confines of the studio system, saw the effort as trying “as honestly as I could to deal with certain human themes,” and as such, in its strengths and its weaknesses, The Rain People was and remains an exemplar of what the New Hollywood hoped to be. A hot filmmaker at the time, Coppola reports being showered with offers to make big budget studio pictures, and many urged him to take the money when it was on offer, as there would always be opportunities to make intimate, low budget movies, but studio love was notoriously fickle. Instead Coppola channeled his inner Cassavetes: “the world is filled with guys who said, well, I’m going to make the money and then make the personal films,” he explained at the time, “[but] somehow, they never get around to doing it.”
Much of the moviemaking on-the-road was captured by George Lucas, a production associate on the picture, who, armed with his own camera, also crafted a short “making of” documentary, Filmmaker. It includes numerous tidbits of interest – rehearsals, arguments over content and choices, complaints (Coppola complained a lot), location scouting – and the hilarious ritual of all scruffy hands transitioning to a clean cut look (Coppola even shaved his beard) so as to be presentable for negotiations with various local officials in the heartland.
Lucas, of course, would soon lose interest in making ambitious, introspective films. Ironically, his commercial success made it less likely that other filmmakers would be allowed to produce their own.
It’s hard to explain
“License and registration”
Parting company at the bus station
No Happy Endings . . .