Alicia I love this movie so much

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

PWNYCNY This is a great movie. This is a powerful. It's about people dealing with repressed emotions. It is about denial. It is about love. It is about an angry woman who falls in love with a brain-damaged ex-football player, and cannot accept the fact that she in love with such a man. It is about a traumatized police officer who denies his real feelings for his deceased wife. It is about the ex-football whose calm and pliable demeanor masks rage. This may be Francis Ford Coppola's greatest movie. It is unpretentious, it is real. The story is timeless; the themes relevant and compelling. A woman wants to break away from convention, and so flees. She is out of control, but maintains her sense of compassion. She wants love, desperately, and feels love too, but is too mixed up to sort out her thoughts, which remain jumbled in her mind. What she cannot admit is that the object of her love, the person for whom she really, truly cares for, is a man that is so far removed from what she considers to be one worthy of love, that it freaks her out. And this is the gist of the story: how people are so out of touch with how they feel that they cannot accept the truth even when it is right before their very eyes. She ran away from home, and came to the end of her journey, but too late. She wanted to be free but was unwilling to jettison all the bourgeois, middle-class junk that was keeping her enslaved. The character of Killer, played with great skill by James Caan, symbolizes the kind of man that contemporary society mocks and scorns - he is quiet, kind, loyal and strong without being pushy or bossy. Yet he is what the woman really wants, except that she cannot admit it, because of her own hang-ups, until it is too late. The strength of this story is contained in its honesty. The story and the characters are plausible and are not caricatures. It's just too bad that in this movie the truth is unpleasant, but if it were pleasant, then the movie would be hokum, and who needs that?

bobvend Shirley Knight plays a newly-pregnant suburban housewife who's slow desperate panic has driven her to flee the existence laid out ahead of her. As she takes off in a station wagon, we don't know where she's going and neither does she. She has taken no luggage on her journey but nevertheless brings with her a lot of baggage. Much of her character is revealed during sporadic calls home to her husband who is not so much distraught as he is abusive. These conversations, because of their first-rate execution, are charged with realism.She soon picks up hitch-hiker James Caan, who turns out to be a former football player who's head injury during a game has left him mentally deficient, a large child. Soon after his injury and subsequent surgery, the college he had played for stuffed 1000 dollars into his pocket and washed their hands of him, casting him adrift to fend for himself. With apparently no family to look after him, Knight's character unwittingly becomes his de facto mother.Knight is unwilling to take on motherhood in any form, and is already considering an abortion. In another sense she tries several times to "abort" Caan's character as well. She often abandons him roadside as she becomes overwhelmed by fear and desperation at the grim inescapable realization that she is his only help. And she can't even help herself. Robert Duvall rounds out the cast as an abusive hard-worn motorcycle cop who, as another reviewer has noted, represents the husband Knight has run away from. Acting is first-rate all around, as is Coppola's direction in a film that was definitely a '60's film yet far ahead of its time. Certainly the finest role for Shirley Knight, an actress who definitely proved up to be to the challenge. Anyone who has suffered through one too many Hollywood "feel-good" movies will find welcome relief in The Rain People- bleak but real and utterly fascinating.

sdave7596 Just caught "The Rain People" on Turner Classic Movies late one night. The film was released in 1969. Shirley Knight stars as Natalie, a Long Island housewife who -- exact reasons unknown -- leaves her husband and embarks on a road trip, not knowing exactly where she is going. Natalie is also newly pregnant, which complicates things. Along the way, she picks up a brain-damaged ex-football player "Jimmy" (James Caan), who has been kicked out of his college and is hitchhiking. There are many twists and turns along the way between these two, as Natalie struggles to take care of Jimmy and she begins to realize he is mentally limited and cannot take care of himself. She is going through her own struggles, needless to say, and in no position to care for him. Natalie appears to be a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown at times; she makes some odd phone calls to her husband, who begs her to come home. Natalie tries to dump Jimmy several times, only to have him re-enter her life through circumstances. A young Robert Duvall plays a strange and troubled cop who befriends Natalie. You get the sense all along that this film is going to end badly, and it does. This film is certainly uneven at times, and the script is somewhat lacking. Francis Ford Coppola directed this, and of course he would soon become immensely famous in the next few years for directing "The Godfather." The actors are good ones, needless to say, as they all would have futures ahead of them in film. Shirley Knight is the least known of the three, although she is also underrated as an actor. James Caan is especially effective here and he seems to just inhabit this character. This film remains little more than a curiosity now, no doubt because it is an early movie of Coppola's, and I confess I had never heard of it. So God bless Turner Classic Movies for bringing it to a new audience.

Jeannot At least one kind. Very human and moving. Not out to teach a lesson or anything like that. All principals are effective. I saw the movie years ago and still remember it (but can't remember the Morgan Fairchild role).And a nice slice of American life.