When It Rains, It Pours

The Rainmaker (1956)

Directed by Joseph Anthony

Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey, Earl Holliman

Grade: B

To all intents and purposes The Rainmaker is a Tennessee Williams adaptation, with its repressed and distorted sexual relationships and small town drama. It has nothing to do with Williams but his presence and influence is nevertheless felt in N. Richard Nash's adaptation (from his own play), the story of a spinster determined to marry and settle down on her own terms. Said spinster, Lizzie Curry, is livened by screen stalwart Katharine Hepburn, fresh from a similarly timid turn as a romanced singleton in David Lean's Summertime the year previously.

Having recently seen Summer and Smoke it isn't difficult to surmise how The Rainmaker emerges as a much more successful outing, staunchly characterised even as it lets Hepburn dally between nobility and self-loathing. "I can't move in these clothes" she exclaims, in a particularly gruelling scene in which she deconstructs herself in harsh self-evaluation while her flabbergasted father looks on. Unlike De Havilland's Catherine Sloper in The Heiress, Lizzie isn't afraid to confront uneasy realities, her long monologues largely well judged by Hepburn, even as they ensure the production is exactly that; a production, accompanied by a try-hard score that sparkles but can't single-handedly cinematise. Hepburn herself is too old to play Lizzie, and regularly reverts to her triumphant Alice Adams to detail the wrenching awkwardness of the single life. She does have some beautifully touching moments, particularly in the earlier-referred scene with her father, and when she rashly flirts with suitor Wendell Corey.

Burt Lancaster's arrival as a lothario professing he can bring rain to a depleted town instigates problems for Lizzie, who develops an attraction for him, compromising her rational romantic ideals. The question of whether Lancaster's Bill Starbuck is a genius or a conman eventually dissipates, but Starbuck's promise provides the basis for The Rainmaker's psychosexual analysis. Has Lizzie been waiting for an outsider to whisk her away from "normality"? Ultimately, as a personality Lizzie often seems too aware of herself, her family dynamic, her social situation, to the extent where she lectures her father, brothers, Starbuck, about relationships without putting anything into practice. It's always easier to say than do, but Lizzie is enough of an informative voice for Anthony as it is, and feels restlessly fetishised to hammer home issues the film could have dealt with through other characters, particularly the decreasingly relevant brother Noah.

By the time the inevitable rain shower ends this frothy romp The Rainmaker has weighed in at two hours of self-conscious longing for happiness, unmistakeably compact in narrative regardless of the frenetic, sprawling way in which Lizzie conducts herself. There's enough here to warrant the film's neuroticism though; The Rainmaker knows better than to cast its net, and is all the better for sticking to and richening its intrepid subject, ingratiating to the end.

Personal Canon: 90. Separate Tables (1958)

Directed by Delbert Mann
Starring: David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper

Bournemouth hotels should be serene during the off-season; a time where the long-term residents can relish the lack of drunken tourists and screaming kids. The host of characters that inhabit the Bournemouth hotel featured in Delbert Mann's Separate Tables, however, seemingly don't want the drama of the holidays to end, and backstab, bitch, and conduct affairs with barely a second thought. This film isn't so much like Edmund Goulding's delightfully trashy 1932 Best Picture winner though, bleakly satirising its inhabitants to enlighten ever-present social divides and exercising a crisp, cut-throat humour.

Almost vehement that we consign the wild bunch to an array of archetypes (the old maid, the glamourpuss, the stubborn elite, the dirty old man) Separate Tables encourages us to evaluate these assumptions and their easily-concluded nature, and does so by distributing its characters in a thoroughly interesting political spectrum, which helps to highlight the internal struggles of these people to simply move with the times. The middle portion of the film, in which Dame Gladys Cooper's utterly immovable Mrs. Railton-Bell confronts the private life of David Niven's Major, is incredibly telling. Her desire to include everything and everyone in his business, as an act of morally-ingrained manipulation, emphasises the old-guard ethics and hypocritical etiquette of a generation in fear of its place in the world. With war long gone, and marooned in an age of consumerism, the teenager, rock n'roll, Mrs. Railton-Bell exhibits the still-prevalent desperation to live up to perceived class-driven archetypes, and typifies the confusion of Table's erratic, aging community.

A further salute to this is Burt Lancaster's reverence and hatred of the glamorous, man-eating Rita Hayworth, whom he truly loves but views as a riskier prospect than the matronly, traditional Wendy Hiller. When a man's doubting Rita Hayworth as a romantic option, you have to reckon he's got hangups, right? Deborah Kerr's Sibyl is the centre of the film, and the political spectrum, as she's been denied the freedom of thought by her restrictive mother. So too the major: the 'tentative' romance that he and Sibyl engage in culminating in a tremendous, wrenchingly half-spoken scene towards the end, which provides the most genuine and capping element of Mann's rich endeavour. As a term, 'separate tables' may appear harmless enough, but its mild-mannered etiquette is a mask for more insidious insecurities, fears, motivations; seeing yourself through other people is hard to take.