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.
Well, the clock has now struck midnight on the West Coast and that officially means that it is 2026 in the United States! What better way to start things off than by sharing a scene that I love from one of the greatest and most important films of all time, 1974’s The Godfather Part II?
The scene below takes place on New Year’s Eve. The scene starts in 1958 and it ends in 1959. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and his brother Fredo (John Cazale) are in Havana at the invitation of Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). Roth know that Cuba could be a gold mine for the American mob but Michael, from the start, realizes that the country’s corrupt government is on the verge of collapse and that it’s about to be replaced by something even worse. (Admittedly, that’s my opinion. Director Francis Ford Coppola had a much higher opinion of Castro and the communists than I did.) Tragically, it’s also in Havana that Michael realizes that Fredo betrayed him to his enemies. On December 31st, 1958, as the new year is celebrated in Havana, the rebels ride into the city. While the President of Cuba prepares to announce that he will be fleeing the country, Michael confronts his brother and tells him that he knows the truth. Later, as they both attempt to flee the country, Michael and Fredo see each other on the streets. Fredo runs from Michael, refusing his offer to help. Though Fredo would eventually return to the family, the film’s ending revealed Fredo’s first instinct was the correct one.
Here’s a scene that I love, featuring great work from both Al Pacino and the brilliant John Cazale:
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Happy holidays!
Let’s get December started with….
4 Shots From 4 Christmas Films
The Godfather (1972, dir by Francis Ford Coppola, DP: Gordon Willis)
Lethal Weapon (1987, dir by Richard Donner, DP: Stephen Goldblatt)
Die Hard (1988, dir by John McTiernan, DP: Jan de Bont)
Die Hard 2 (1990, dir by Renny Harlin, DP: Oliver Wood)
Today’s scene that I love comes from my favorite film of all time, 1972’s The Godfather.
In this scene, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) has moved on and is working as a teacher. Suddenly, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) shows up. He’s been back from Sicily for a year and he’s working with his father. Michael promises her that the Corleone family is getting out of the rackets. We, of course, know that is never going to happen.
Sinbad (Sergei Stolyarov) returns to his land after going on a great quest. He sees that half of the citizens are rich and happy and always dancing. He sees that the other half are poor and never happy. Those of us watching see that the film’s version of Persia looks a lot like Russia. Sinbad announces that he is going to capture the Bird of Happiness and bring it back to his people. He sets sail and is given help by the daughter of Neptune. Sinbad visits many lands and spend some time underwater, where Neptune offers him the hand of his daughters and there’s also an octopus hanging around and watching in the background. Sinbad never finds the Bird of Happiness but it doesn’t matter because he realizes that his people have all the happiness that they need in Persia.
The Magic Voyage 0f Sinbad may seem like a strange Sinbad film and that’s because it was never a Sinbad film in the first place. It was actually a Russian film called Sadko, about a young Russian man who tries to prove himself by finding the Bird of Happiness. In America, Sadko was even released under its original name and plot in 1953. No one paid much attention to it.
Then, in 1962, Roger Corman got his hands on the American distribution rights for the film and he decided to rerelease it. He changed the title to The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and he hired a young film student to write narration for the film and to also “translate” the film’s dialogue so that it could be dubbed into English. The very Russian Sadko instead became a film about Sinbad, the legendary Persian sailor.
The Corman version went on to become the better-known version, largely because it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Personally, I prefer the Corman version because the badness of the dialogue and the overly solemn narration go a long way toward making up for the fact that this is a 79-minute movie about someone searching for something and failing to find it. After making so many grand promises, Sinbad returns to his home and tells everyone that he actually lied and they don’t need the Bird of Happiness to be happy. The film ends abruptly, probably because the people rose up and tossed Sinbad in the ocean at that point.
As for that film student who wrote the script, Francis Ford Coppola later did alright for himself.
1963’s Dementia13 is a significant film for another reasons.
For one, it’s the mainstream feature film debut of Francis Ford Coppola. (Coppola has said that he directed two softcore films before Dementia13 but they’ve been lost to history.) Both Coppola’s screenplay and his direction were heavily influenced by the early giallo films that were coming out of Italy. One could argue that this is the first American film to pay homage to Mario Bava.
Dementia13 is also the first film on which Coppola ever went overbudget. This film is literally the start of an era.
Coppola himself has been critical of Dementia13. Producer Roger Corman was not happy with the first cut of the film and added a few scenes that took away from Coppola’s pacing. That said, it’s still an atmospheric and creepy forerunner to the American slasher film. The scene in which Launa Anders goes for a swim has been duplicated in numerous other films and it’s still effective in the way that it chops away at the audience’s sense of security. It certainly freaks me out. Of course, I’m not much of a swimmer. I’m a good drowner, though.
1979’s Apocalypse Now reimagines the Vietnam War as pop art.
Jim Morrison sings The End in the background as slow-motion helicopters pass in front of a lush jungle. The jungle erupts into flame while in a dingy hotel room, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets drunks, practices his karate moves, and smashes a mirror before collapsing to the floor in tears. The next morning, the hung-over and bandaged Willard ends up at a U.S. military base where he has a nice lunch with Lt. General Corman (G.D. Spradlin) and Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford) and a nearly silent man wearing an undone tie. Willard is asked if it’s true that he assassinated an enemy colonel. Willard replies that he did not and that the operation was classified, proving that he can both lie and follow military protocol. Willard is told that a Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone rogue and his mission is to go into Cambodia and terminate his command with “extreme” prejudice. It’s a famous scene that features G.D. Spradlin delivering a brilliant monologue about good and evil and yet it’s often missed that Willard is getting his orders from Roger Corman and George Lucas.
(Roger Corman was the mentor of director Francis Ford Coppola while the pre-Star Wars George Lucas was Coppola’s business partner. Indeed, Apocalypse Now was originally somewhat improbably planned to be a George Lucas film.)
Up the river, Willard heads on a patrol boat that is populated with characters who could have come out of an old World War II service drama. Chief (Albert Hall) is tough and no-nonsense. Lance (Sam Bottoms) is the goofy comic relief who likes to surf. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is the kid who is obviously doomed from the minute we first see him. Chef (Fredric Forrest) is the overage, tightly-wound soldier who just wants to find mangoes in the jungle and who worries that, if he dies in a bad place, his soul won’t be able to find Heaven. The Rolling Stones are heard on the boat’s radio. Soldiers on the other patrol boats moon the boat and toss incendiary devices on the roof. It’s like a frat prank war in the middle of a war.
Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is a badass calvary officer whose helicopter raids are legendary amongst the enemy and a dedicated surfer who tries to turn every night into the equivalent of an AIP Beach Party film. He’s a brilliant warrior who speaks with Malibu accent (“Charlie don’t surf!”) and who doesn’t flinch when a bomb goes off near him. “I love the smell a napalm in the morning,” he says and, for a few moments, you really wish the film would just abandon Willard so we could spend more time with Kilgore. “Some day this war is going to end,” he says with a reassuring nod, showing a non-neurotic attitude that is the opposite of Kurtz’s. Willard says that he could tell Kilgore was going to get through the war without even a scratch and it’s true. Kilgore doesn’t try to rationalize or understand things. He just accepts the reality and adjusts. He’s a true surfer.
The film grows progressively more surreal the closer the boat heads up the river and gets closer to Cambodia. A USO show turns violent as soldiers go crazy at the sight of the Playboy Bunnies, dressed in denim outfits and cowboy hats and twirling cap guns like the love interest in a John Wayne western. A visit to a bridge that is built every day and blown up every night is a neon-lit, beautiful nightmare. Who’s the commanding officer? No one knows and no one cares.
The closer Willard gets to Kurtz, the stranger the world gets. Fog covers the jungles. A tiger leaps out of nowhere. Dennis Hopper shows up as a photojournalist who rambles as if Billy from Easy Rider headed over to Vietnam instead of going to Mardi Gras. Scott Glenn stands silently in front of a temple, surrounded by dead bodies that feel as if they could have been brought over from an Italian cannibal film. Kurtz, when he shows up, is an overweight, bald behemoth who talks in riddles and who hardly seem to be the fearsome warrior that he’s been described as being. “The horror, the horror,” he says at one point in one of the few moments that links Apocalypse Now to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Directed by near-communist Francis Ford Coppola and written by the unapologetically right-wing John Milius, Apocalypse Now is actually less about the reality of Vietnam and more about how the images of the war shaped pop culture the world over. It’s a reminder that Vietnam was known for being the first television war and that counterculture was not just made up of dropouts but also of writers, actors, and directors. Kurtz may say that Willard’s been sent by grocery store clerks but actually, he’s been sent by the B-movie producers who first employed and mentored the directors and the actors who would eventually become the mainstays of the New Hollywood. The film subverts many classic war film cliches but, at the same time, it stays true to others. Clean dying while listening to a tape recording of his mother telling him not to get shot and to come home safe is the type of manipulative, heart-tugging moment that could have appeared in any number of World War II-era films. And while Coppola has always said the film was meant to be anti-war, Col. Kilgore remains the most compelling character. Most viewers would probably happily ride along with Kilgore while he flies over Vietnam and plays Wagner. The striking images of Vietnam — the jungle, the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air — stay in the mind far more than the piles of dead bodies that appear in the background.
It’s a big, messy, and ultimately overwhelming film and, while watching it, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Coppola wasn’t totally sure what he was really trying to say. It’s a glorious mess, full of stunning visuals, haunting music, and perhaps the best performance of Robert Duvall’s legendary career. The film is too touched with genius to not be watchable but how one reacts overall to the film will probably depend on which version you see.
The original version, which was released in 1979 and was nominated for Best Picture, is relentless with its emphasis on getting up the river and finding Kurtz. Willard obsesses on Kurtz and really doesn’t have much to do with the other people on the boat. It gives the story some much-needed narrative momentum but it also makes Kurtz into such a legendary badass that it’s hard not to be disappointed when Willard actually meets him. You’re left to wonder how, if Kurtz has been living in the jungle and fighting a brutal and never-ending guerilla war against the communists, he’s managed to gain so much weight. Brando, who reportedly showed up on set unprepared and spent days improvising dialogue, gives a bizarre performance and it’s hard to view the Kurtz we meet as being the Kurtz we’ve heard about. As strong as the film is, it’s hard not to be let down by who Kurtz ultimately turns out to be.
In 2001 and 2019, Coppola released two more versions of the film, Redux and The Final Cut. These versions re-inserted a good deal of footage that was edited out of the original cut. Most of that footage deals with Willard dealing with the crew on the boat and it’s easy to see why it was cut. The scenes of Willard bonding with the crew feel out of character for both Willard and the rest of the crew. A scene where Willard arranges for Clean, Lance, and Chef to spend time with the Playboy bunnies seems to go on forever and features some truly unfortunate acting. Worst of all, Redux totally ruins Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” monologue by having Willard suddenly steal his surf board. Again, it’s out of character for Willard and it actually feels a bit disrespectful to Duvall’s performance to suddenly turn Kilgore into a buffoon.
But then there are moments that do work. I actually like the lengthy French Plantation scene. By the time Willard, Lance, and Chef stumble into the plantation, the journey upriver has gotten so surreal that it makes a strange sort of sense that they would run into a large French family arguing politics while a clown tries to keep everyone distracted. The new versions of the film are undeniably disjointed but they also shift the focus off of finding Kurtz and place it more on Willard discovering how weird things are getting in Vietnam. As such, it’s less of a disappointment when Kurtz actually shows up. Much as with the French Plantation scene, the journey has become so weird that Kurtz being overweight and pretentious feels somehow appropriate.
What all the versions of the film have in common is that they’re all essentially a neon-lit dream of pop cultural horror. Is Apocalypse Now a horror film? Critic Kim Newman argued that it owed a lot to the genre. Certainly, that’s the case when Willard reaches the temple and finds himself surrounded by corpses and and detached heads. Even before that, though, there are elements of horror. The enemy is always unseen in the jungle and, when they attack, they do so quickly and without mercy. In a scene that could almost have come from a Herzog film, the boat is attacked with toy arrows until suddenly, out of nowhere, someone throws a very real spear. Until he’s revealed, Kurtz is a ghostly figure and Willard is the witch hunter, sent to root him out of his lair and set his followers on fire. If the post-60s American horror genre was shaped by the images coming out of Vietnam then Apocalypse Now definitely deserves to be considered, at the very least, horror-adjacent.
Apocalypse Now was controversial when it was released. (It’s troubled production had been the talk of Hollywood for years before Coppola finally finished his film.) It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the far more conventional Kramer vs Kramer. Robert Duvall was the film’s sole acting nominee but he lost the award to Melvyn Douglas’s turn in Being There. Douglas was very good in Being There and I imagine giving him the Oscar was also seen as a way of honoring his entire career. That said, Duvall’s performance was amazing. In his relatively brief screen time, Duvall somehow managed to take over and ground one of the most unruly films ever made. The Oscar definitely should have gone to him.
As for the film itself, all three versions, flaws and all, are classics. It’s a film that proves that genius can be found in even the messiest of productions.
Who wouldn’t love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?
In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, New Jersey-accented Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever. However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon. His performance here is rather earnest, with little of the sarcasm that would later become his trademark. Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual. Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman. That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.
Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven. The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie. Boris Karloff’s scenes were filmed first, with the other actors performing in front of a body double during their scenes. Among the many directors who filmed bits and pieces of TheTerror: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Coppola’s roommate Dennis Jakob, and even Jack Nicholson himself! (Despite this number of directors involved, Corman received the sole directorial credit.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have a definite historical value.
(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets. In that film, Karloff plays a version of himself, an aging horror actor who watches The Terror and dismisses it as being “terrible.”)
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to Martin Sheen.
In this scene from 1979’s ApocalypseNow, Sheen shows the intensity that not only nearly killed him when he suffered a heart attack during filming but which also served to make Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic a true classic.
Through the Shattered Lens 