A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) The lead casting in A Walk in the Spring Rain is promising: Ingrid Bergman (in a rare late-career American film) and Anthony Quinn in a complex mature romance between the neglected wife of an academic on a sabbatical in Tennessee, and a rural local quite unlike her husband. There’s further drama, but you’d have a hard time getting excited for it, as the film unspools leisurely with no real stakes and even less passion for its own material. Quinn plays his rough persona and Bergman is rarely less than quite good—but the film itself can’t measure up to its location shooting, its premise or the power of its actors. It’s almost obscure today, which is understandable enough: there have been far better movies about similar topics, and this one is often a chore to get through.