Andrew Duncan | Through the Shattered Lens

1969’s The Rain People tells the story of Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight), a Long Island housewife who, one morning, sneaks out of her house, gets in her station wagon, and leaves. She later calls her husband Vinny from a pay phone and she tells him that she’s pregnant. Vinny is overjoyed. Natalie, however, says that she needs time on her own.

Natalie keeps driving. In West Virginia, she comes upon a young man named Jimmy Kligannon (James Caan). She picks him up looking for a one-night stand but she changes her mind when she discover that Jimmy is a former college football player who, due to an injury on the field, has been left with severe brain damage. The college paid Jimmy off with a thousand dollars. The job that Jimmy had waiting for him disappears. Jimmy’s ex-girlfriend (Laura Crews) cruelly says that she wants nothing more to do with him. Natalie finds herself traveling with the child-like Jimmy, always trying to find a safe place to leave him but never quite being able to bring herself to do so.

Jimmy is not the only man that Natalie meets as she drives across the country. Eventually, she is stopped by Gordon (Robert Duvall), a highway motorcycle cop who gives her a speeding ticket and then invites her back to the trailer that he shares with his young daughter. (Gordon’s house previously burned down.) Natalie follows Gordon back to his trailer, where the film’s final tragic act plays out.

The Rain People was the fourth film to be directed Francis Ford Coppola. Stung by the critical and commercial failure of the big-budget musical Finian’s Rainbow, Coppola made a much more personal and low-key film with The Rain People. While the critics appreciated The Rain People, audiences stayed away from the rather downbeat film. Legendary producer Robert Evans often claimed that, when Coppola was first mentioned as a director for The Godfather, he replied, “His last movie was The Rain People, which got rained one.” Whether that’s true or not, it is generally acknowledged that the commercial failure of The Rain People set back Coppola’s directing career. (Indeed, at the time that The Godfather went into production, Coppola was better-known as a screenwriter than a director.) Of course, it was also on The Rain People that Coppola first worked with James Caan and Robert Duvall. (Duvall, who was Caan’s roommate, was a last-second replacement for Rip Torn.) Both Caan and Duvall would appear in The Godfather, as Sonny Corleone and Tom Hagen respectively. Both would be Oscar-nominated for their performances. (It would be Caan’s only Oscar nomination, which is amazing when you consider how many good performances James Caan gave over the course of his career.)

As for The Rain People, it may have been “rained on” but it’s still an excellent film. Shirley Knight, Robert Duvall, and James Caan all give excellent performances and, despite a few arty flashbacks, Coppola’s direction gives them room to gradually reveal their characters to us. The film sympathizes with Knight’s search for identity without ever idealizing her journey. (She’s not always nice to Jimmy and Jimmy isn’t always easy to travel with.) As for Caan and Duvall, they both epitomize two different types of men. Caan is needy but innocent, a former jock transformed into a lost giant. As for Duvall, he makes Gordon into a character who, at first, charms us and that later terrifies us. Gordon could have been a one-dimensional villain but Duvall makes him into someone who, in his way, is just as lost as Natalie and Jimmy.

The Rain People is a good film. It’s also a very sad film. It made my cry but that’s okay. It earned the tears.

I have mixed feelings about the 1978 best picture nominee An Unmarried Woman and I really wish I didn’t because this is one of those films that I really want to love.

Erica (Jill Clayburgh, who did not win the Oscar that she deserved for this film) appears to have the perfect life. She works at an art gallery in New York. She has smart, sophisticated friends. She has an accomplished teenager daughter (Lisa Lucas). She has a beautiful apartment. Early on in the film, she wakes up and literally dances from her bedroom to the living room and back again.

And, of course, she has a husband. His name is Martin and he’s a successful stock broker. Of course, there are hints that everything might not be perfect. She and Martin are a cute couple but they’re not exactly passionate. One need only watch Erica carefully wash dogshit off of Martin’s expensive running shoes to tell who is getting the most out of the marriage. Add to that, Martin is played by Michael Murphy and, as anyone familiar with 70s cinema knows, Murphy specialized in playing well-dressed, outwardly friendly heels. And, of course, the film is called An Unmarried Woman and the title can’t be true as long as Erica’s married.

So, you’re not exactly surprised when Martin suddenly breaks down in tears and tells Erica that he’s fallen in love with a younger woman and that he’s leaving her.

The rest of the film deals with Erica’s attempts to adjust to suddenly being an unmarried woman and a single mom. We follow as she struggles to get back her confidence. The scenes of Erica dealing with her suddenly rebellious daughter really struck home to me, largely because I’m a rebellious daughter of divorce myself. There’s a few great scenes of Erica turning to her girlfriends for support. (Importantly, one of Erica’s friends is happily married, as if the film wants to make sure that we understand that not all marriages are as bad as Erica and Martin’s.) We watch as Erica starts dating again, having a memorable one-night stand with the obnoxious but oddly likable Charlie (Cliff Gorman). Finally, she ends up dating a rugged, bearded artist (Alan Bates) and she has to decide whether she wants to remain independent or not.

And it’s all amazingly well-acted and fun to watch but I have to admit that I was a little bit disappointed the first time that I saw An Unmarried Woman. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to like it as much as I wanted. The more I thought about it, the more clear my issue with it became.

As a character, Eric was simply too wealthy.

As I watched Erica struggle with being an unmarried woman, it was hard for me not to compare her struggles with the struggles that my own mom had to deal with after her divorce. The film, and specifically Clayburgh’s lead performance, got so much right. But there’s a difference — a huge difference — between an unmarried woman who has an apartment in Manhattan and a dream job at an art gallery and a woman like my mom who worked multiple jobs, spent hours worrying about how to pay the bills, and who had to do all of this while dealing with four stubborn daughters. And so, whenever I saw Erica talking to her therapist about how upset she was over suddenly being single, there was a part of me that wanted to say, “Try doing it while living in South Dallas and having to deal with a brat like me.”

The second time that I watched An Unmarried Woman, I was able to better appreciate the film. Now that I knew that Erica’s experiences were not going to be universal, I could focus on Jill Clayburgh’s great performance in the lead role. I could marvel at how marvelously wimpy Michael Murphy was in the role of Martin. I could laugh at Cliff Gorman’s comedic performance. As for Alan Bates as that bearded artist — well, sorry, that still didn’t work for me. Eventually, I could accept Erica’s perfect apartment and her perfect job but suddenly introducing a perfect boyfriend who also happened to be a passionate and financially successful painter; it all felt like a bit too much.

But, in the end, An Unmarried Woman is a good film and a valuable historical document of its time. If for no other reason, see it for Jill Clayburgh’s lead performance.