Rain

Astounding and a revelation: “Rain” is a film adaptation of a novel by Somerset Maugham directed by Lewis Milestone and released in 1932. The film features Joan Crawford as a prostitute, Sadie Thompson, and Walter Huston as a missionary who attempts to convert her. Guy Kibbe plays Trader Joe and the film, set in Pago Pago, is a famous example of early sound-era kitsch...except that the damned thing is completely contrary to everything that the viewer expects, subtle, challenging, and, ultimately, disturbing. Clearly, “Rain” is intended as a rejoinder to Von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel” and, in fact, a dream double-feature would screen these two films, both equally great, I think, back-to-back. In “The Blue Angel”, Lola Lola seduces and, then, humiliates an exemplar of haute bourgeois society, poor Professor Unrat, played by Emil Jannings. In “Rain,” Walter Huston as a relentlessly righteous missionary seems to humiliate and chasten Sadie Thompson, bending her to his will. In the German film, “The Blue Angel” the narrative is a critique of bourgeois values; in “Rain”, by contrast, the prostitutes seems to succumb to the preaching of the missionary and agrees to repent and accept penitentiary imprisonment as evidence of her atonement. The question animating any analysis of these two films is this: what does the director, the film-maker, think about his alluring prostitute heroine? In “The Blue Angel,” Von Sternberg sides with the whore against polite society -- although Jannings’ professor is destroyed, he is, at least, liberated by his destruction, he dies but the cage in which he is confined is also wrecked. In “Rain,” the situation is more complex, and, dare I say, more profound: the prostitute seems to accede to the will of the missionary -- she can not evade his ministrations and humbles herself to his preaching. And, yet, the movie’s ambiguity is remarkable and can not be resolved -- has the prostitute really been converted or is she merely feigning obedience to the will of God? And doesn’t the denouement, shocking even in 2014, suggest that the prostitute, like Lola Lola wins the day? The fundamental question is this: whose will is the stronger -- the whore or the missionary? a theme articulated by Trader Joe who reads Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” each night before going to bed. The complexity of this film is enhanced by imagery of Joan Crawford, draped in skin-tight black garments and back-lit -- she looks like Aimee Semple MacPherson and has the same decadent erotic frisson, the same seductive appeal -- the most powerfully sexual women at the end of the Jazz Era (and the film laments prohibition) are like Mary Magdalene, former sinners turned into saints, or vice-versa. In many scenes, Joan Crawford’s Sadie wears an ill-fitting plaid garment, much too tight across her lower belly and hips -- this is a pre-Code film and imagery of this kind would not reappear in Hollywood until the mid-sixties. The fact that Crawford’s gowns don’t really fit and, indeed, are unflattering to her rather mannish physique is intentional -- she isn’t comfortable in her whore’s garments and they don't, in fact, fit her very well, a point that is thematic to the film. Milestone, who directed “All Quiet on the Western Front” a couple years before, seems to have been the Scorsese of the early thirties -- his camera movements are delirious (he favors 360 degree tracking shots) and violent whip-pans. In an early sequence, the camera whips to the right at high speed, cutting from men marching in that direction to natives carrying a canoe on their shoulders and moving to the left. The effect is disorienting, but establishes a sense of spatial expressionism that is integral to the film: we can’t really figure out where we are -- four other whip-pans in fast succession, all snapping to to the right, establish the major characters. At the melodramatic climax of the film, the camera focuses on Walter Huston’s face, suddenly contorted with an odd asymmetrical leer, and, then, the camera whips to the left -- a sinister turn, one might say -- signifying the sudden and calamitous resolution of the film. Throughout the movie, rain pours down and many scenes are almost inaudible because of the rush and roar of falling water. The rain gushes out of penis-shaped downspouts and the downpour is a symbolic backdrop to the super-heated confrontations between the characters. This film is incredibly subversive -- it rouses strong feelings about vice, virtue, and hypocrisy and seems to endorse Hollywood norms as to morality, a position that is surprising: lip-service paid by Bablyon go Jerusalem -- after all, there is nothing more fundamentally subversive in Hollywood than a film that endorses Christian morality -- and, yet, in fact, the movie takes a completely unanticipated and surprising turn. This is the kind of film that we would watch in University film studies classes had it been made in Berlin in the twenties or France in the thirties. Unjustly neglected, I think, “Rain” is one of the greatest films of the thirties.