Credit: Warner Bros./Seven Arts
by Alex Lei Featured Film Retrospective

The Rain People — Francis Ford Coppola

September 30, 2024

“They said, ‘Take the money while it is being offered, and then you go make your own personal movie.’ And there’s a lot of sense to that, except the world is filled with guys who said, ‘Oh, I’ll make the money and then make the personal film.’ Somehow, they never get around to doing it… If you’re not willing to risk some money when you’re young, then you’re certainly not gonna ever risk anything in the years that follow.”  —  Francis Ford Coppola, Filmmaker: A Diary by George Lucas (1969)

In the popular conception, Francis Ford Coppola was a filmmaker of the ‘70s. He was the big man, the defining pillar of New Hollywood, from his massive hits with the first two Godfather films to his era-ending Apocalypse Now (1979), to even his much-lauded, lower-key The Conversation (1974). This is the mythic Coppola, the mad genius with all the money and the full weight of filmmaking infrastructure behind him. More than anything, though, this idea of Coppola obfuscates the man’s storied career, highlighting his renegade spirit only in its greatest success (Apocalypse) and practically missing the family man and experimenter he is at heart. In my book, the best entryway into Coppola’s work — one that gives the best perspective on who he is and what kind of filmmaker he desires to be — is not one of his solidly canonized, clearly polished ‘70s works, but his most independent movie of the ‘60s: The Rain People.

A woman wakes up and decides to leave her husband. She drives to her parents’ house while he’s still asleep. They don’t understand. She heads on the road out of New York, off to somewhere in America. Natalie is pregnant, and not sure if she wants to keep it. In the middle of somewhere on a two-lane road, she spots a hitchhiker — a tall, handsome man. She stops, but when he reaches for the door she hesitates and drives away. She looks at him, sad, in the rearview and stops again. “Can I have a ride?” She obliges. They sit in awkward silence for a while on the drive. “What’s your name?” Natalie eventually asks. “Uhh, Jimmy. People call me ‘Killer.’” “Killer?” She laughs. She’s charmed by him, his apparent sweetness lending an irony to his nickname. He’s got some money, and they eventually stop and get a motel room together for the night. What seems like it could be a typical, even stereotypical, housewife-on-the-run story, one that could’ve made a light scandal at any time in American cinema’s history up to the point, becomes in this scene the work of an apparent visionary.

Coppola chooses to film what at first seems to be a seduction scene in a single composition, toward a vanity with two angles of mirrors. Out of a flat plain, he creates a 3D space for his actors to dance around in, always looking at each other but somehow mostly separated. Natalie (Shirley Knight) sits at the vanity putting on lipstick when Killer (James Caan) enters, seen out of focus in the right-hand mirror. In fact, a lot of the scene continues out of focus — not intentionally; you can see it gently pull at unprompted times as the camera operator realizes the mistake. But often the focus will land on the back of Knight’s jacket, or onto the edges of the vanity mirrors instead of the pair in frame. The shot continues on, though, and it is clear why: what’s happening on screen is pure magic, the kind of rough, mysterious realism that is usually only seen in something like the works of John Cassavetes. Natalie tells Killer to take his shirt off, he does. She comments on how obedient he is and asks him for a dance. As they waltz toward the camera, there is a hidden cut as Knight passes the frame before they land back in view of the vanity mirror. She asks if he wants to play a game of Simon Says. He doesn’t quite understand the game, but plays along anyways. “Simon says… pick me up.” She has him spin her around, but when she asks to be put down he says “No.” She starts to get worried, but he tells her, “You have to say, ‘Simon says: put me down.’” She does, and he does. She turns the lights off, having their bodies the only things illuminated in this new void. She makes him get down on his knees and bow to her. But she notices something — a scar on his head. The patient, understated sequence is violently interrupted by a handheld camera getting tackled by football players, cutting to a close-up of Killer on the ground writhing in pain. Killer has severe CTE and has been abandoned by his community after his mom died, and Natalie’s seemingly sexy jaunt into the American heartland just revealed its sad weight.

The popular perception of New Hollywood is as a rejuvenation, a jolt of life given to the studio system by way of new blood, through the vigor of the Corman cohort, the explosiveness of Easy Rider (1969), or the freneticism of Scorsese. Really, what it ultimately did was reroute how the money was worked out, with Jaws (1975) inventing the blockbuster and Star Wars (1977) pioneering toy deals. Coppola contributed to this some, too — The Godfather, for a moment, was the highest-grossing film ever made. But what The Rain People highlights from Coppola is not the New Hollywood-ian perception of rebirth, but the quintessentially Coppolan concern of dissolution, whether that is the dissolution of the family (The Godfather films, Tetro [2009]), the dissolution of sanity (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now), the dissolution of youth (The Outsiders [1983], Rumble Fish [1983]), or, in the case of The Rain People, the dissolution of the American ideal.

Unlike the Jack Kerouac or Bob Frank, the road wasn’t the place for Coppola to find America so much as a highway to journey toward its destruction (one has to wonder how his adaptation of Keroauc’s seminal novel would have differed from the deeply misguided 2012 Walter Salles adaptation that ultimately came to fruition, which Coppola EP’d). The Rain People starts with the family unit collapsing under its own weight in an event inspired from the director’s own life, where his mother ran away for three days while he was a kid, only to later return after doing not much more than sit around a motel room by herself. But what if she had gone further down the road? Coppola posits that she would’ve found a society broken by its own violence and imbalances. Killer is the prime example, a man left mentally disabled by a sport that is so American in part because of its explosive physical brutality. He is not a war veteran, but his disability created by the society that raised him could just as well stand in for the countless men returning home after being drafted to Vietnam. No one is acting as a steward for this broken country, either: the policeman that Natalie has a fling with at the end of the movie is as personally shattered and morally corrupt as anyone else in the movie, and the keeper of a petting zoo is the worst of all the characters that the wanderers run into. Natalie tries to ditch Killer with the zookeeper, even though it’s obvious that the man is just trying to steal Killer’s money and use him for free labor. When there, Killer can’t help but let all the animals out of their cages.

Natalie and Killer aren’t societal outsiders because of who they are or what they think, but because they show it — Natalie because one day she woke up and decided to, and Killer because he can’t do anything but. They are the Rain People that Killer tells Natalie about, “people made of rain, and when they cry they disappear altogether, because they cry themselves away.” Their expression leads to their literal dissolution, they have nowhere to go in their pain and sadness but to disappear entirely.

The Rain People is the first of Coppola’s personal pictures, and still stands as one of his best despite the film betraying itself with its ending. The final moments are unbearably cruel, not just thematically, but as a cynical exercise that seeks to give an extraordinarily subtle and complex film a shocking yet dramatically “satisfying” conclusion. It has a narrative point, but it ultimately reads as dishonest — as Coppola is making an argument rather than revealing something, which is what the rest of The Rain People does so incredibly well. The end of the film will start a trend for Coppola, where his films become incredibly well-threaded and dramatically tight, and it certainly aids his ‘70s masterpieces as fond memories and new discoveries for every generation of cinephiles since, as they gesture toward ambiguity while actually working with extreme narrative clarity (Apocalypse Now is probably the most deceptive of these, with its original cut being much more thematically clear than people remember). Still, The Rain People is the beginning of Coppola as the fierce independent who’ll make the picture at whatever the personal or financial cost in order to try to resolve his own dramas through the dream factory of the screen. Moreover, The Rain People, in the naturalism created by its low-budget shooting style, is also the closest Coppola ever got to the brutal honesty of that first wave of New Hollywood forefathered by Cassavetes, placing it both as a coda to the renegade days of the upcoming Hollywood generation and a preview to the kinds of cinema that would take over the studios in the next decade.


Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.