Movie: Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)
Who'll Stop the Rain combines all the characterstic elements that made American cinema fun and interesting in the 1960's, 70's and 80's into a highly entertaining thriller. From its own time period it's got Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), a troubled anti-hero who struggles to live according to his values in a, in his view, rotten society. He is a soldier in Vietnam, about to return home, when his old friend John (Michael Moriarty) asks him to smuggle some heroin into America. The heroin is somehow connected to 'Washington' and Ray's paranoia sets in the moment he sets foot on the San Francisco harbor. It soon turns out his fears are grounded in reality and when the deal goes wrong he has to flee across the West Coast, together with John's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld), an independently minded bookstore worker who is married to John in defiance of her dad, and is also addicted to pills.
The film shares some of Ray's pessimism and it directly presents Vietnam War trauma as the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. That's a bit clumsily directed with a couple too many flashbacks to undefined battle scenes, full of death and destruction, set in slow motion, that are meant to be poetic, but come off as tackily sentimental. Little else in the film can be called sentimental, but it's not above the sort of glorious tackiness and excesses that would define so many 80's movies. Reisz luxuriates in the glossiness of the arrogantly rich parts of Los Angeles (where Ray has come to try to sell the smack) and in the fantastically gaudy behaviors of its citizens, here represented by Eddie (Charles Haid). It's hard to believe that Anthony Zerbe, playing the federal agent in trail of Ray, has even more fun than Haid, colorfuly insulting his two dim henchmen, and super schmuck John. Reisz is happy to let the actors do their own thing, enabling even those with the smallest role to have a couple of memorable moments All of this gives the film a wonderfully impulsive energy (at certain points it almost plays like a dry run for Midnight Run) that you wish was just a bit more stylistically charged and over the top. If the scene at Eddie's house doesn't quite get there, though the playful score brings it very far, the climax with its cacophony of folk music, gun violence and bright lights, does. It reminded me a bit, and this is a compliment, of the Wonder World super weapon scene in Beverly Hills Cop 3, even if it's (mostly) not played for laughs.
That climax takes place around mountainous terrain in New Mexico, in Ray's hiding place he built in the 1960's to serve as a sort of commune away from the civilised world. The place includes an intricately designed sound system that enabled parties to be heard across the entire valley. Now it serves as a place (you know you are near it when you reach the giant peace sign painted on a rock) of refuge for Ray and Marge, who in anticipation of their next steps, dance to old traditional folk songs, share their fears and regrets, and slowly get more and more affection for each other as they make use of natural resources and analogue craftmanship to survive. Cops, criminals and dumb yuppies eventually destroy their serenity, leading to the aforementioned climax and the bleak final moments that remind you that this is indeed a film made in 1978. A couple years later, Nolte gets in the car. Nolte, by the way, is fantastic, in particular during the scenes in New Mexico, where he has to play Ray as mellowed by his love for Marge, without letting him lose his hard edge. His greatest moment though comes before, at Eddie's house, doing some silent face acting that is as almost as great as Robert De Niro's famous eyebrow movements in Goodfellas.
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