The Rain People (1969)

(On Cable TV, November 2021) As an aging movie reviewer who’s accumulating what’s laughably called “maturity,” I’ve gotten much better at not calling movies “boring and dull and pretentious” — there’s usually something good about everything and it’s my job to find what it is (or which audience it would serve best). But the fact that it doesn’t happen as often is not a guarantee that it doesn’t still happen and so, well: The Rain People is boring and dull and pretentious. There’s a reason for that:  Coming from writer-director Francis Ford Coppola in the burgeoning years of the New Hollywood, it gets to play with things that Classic Hollywood would not have allowed: An unsympathetic character leaving her loving husband out of sheer wanderlust; a gritty filmmaking style aping realism and delivering drudgery; an inconclusive conclusion without much in terms of character development. These, obviously, are the tools of literary fiction but in the characteristic zeal that marks, well, much of American history, the New Hollywood filmmakers went far overboard and later generations can only suffer through those early releases. There’s clearly a footnote in film history for The Rain People — not only as an early work from a major American director, but also a film featuring both James Caan and Robert Duvall prior to The Godfather. There’s an audience for those non-formulaic films with closer ties to written character drama than genre pictures — but even aging movie reviewers have their preferences, and I’m throwing my lot with the genre-obsessed plot-dominant camp that does not settle for boring and dull and pretentious.