Cinema: Only Geography

Once upon a time, Hollywood was a town without a country. To portray small-town America, camera crews would generally go no farther than the studio lot, where an idealized Main Street stood gleaming in the California sun. It is much to the credit of Director Francis Ford Coppola that he refused to accept that kind of prefabricated fakery. Bundling a handful of actors and technicians into a fleet of cars, he drove from New York to Colorado, filming a story about a young married woman on the run from responsibility. The result, called The Rain People, has such a strong sense of the U.S. as a dramatic character that Coppola’s people tend to melt into the landscape.

Natalie (Shirley Knight) wakes one morning to a soot-gray New York dawn, turns away from her husband, stares at the ceiling, then makes a quick, silent decision. After a shower and a visit to her parents, she begins her odyssey. Calling her husband from a gas station on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she announces that she is frightened, confused and pregnant. She loves him but wants time to think. So she drives slowly through a Pennsylvania autumn, picking up a hitchhiker named Kilgannon (James Caan) who turns out to be a retarded college-football player with a plate in his head. He has been promised a job by the father of an old college girl friend, but the girl’s family greets him with ridicule. Another job as a handyman on a reptile farm falls through when Kilgannon becomes so frightened of losing Natalie that he starts to let the animals out of their cages. He even interrupts Natalie’s assignation with a Nebraska motorcycle cop (Robert Duvall), provoking an improbable denouement that obviously wanted to say something about violence in America but winds up merely as death by cinematic accident.

Coppola’s other films (You’re a Big Boy Now, Finian’s Rainbow) have been overloaded with a kind of lighter-than-air dramaturgy, and The Rain People sadly falls victim to similar sentimental pretentions. The relationship between Natalie and Kilgannon derives from Of Mice and Men, and much of the dialogue is sophomoric Salinger, as when Kilgannon explains that “the rain people are people made of rain. When they cry, they disappear altogether because they cry themselves away.” Still, the geography is simply splendid. Coppola seems to sense that lying between the Hudson River and the Rockies is the greatest film set in the world. If only he could have used it to better dramatic advantage.