WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN (1978) is the one successful film adaptation of a Robert Stone novel. Written and produced by Stone himself, based on his National Book Award Winning Dog Soldiers, it is also the best movie depiction of the Vietnam War.

That is not to say WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN is a conventional War Movie, nor is it really a film about combat in Vietnam. Only the first few scenes show battle, and about a third of the way through, the action sails away from Vietnam to the U.S.A. and never returns. However, I can't think of another film that so economically shows what the War, in all its cruelty, was like abroad, and how devastating and disconnecting it was for the society back home.

The film begins with shots under its credits of a murky battlefield, a ghostly radio voice calling down what we later realize is "friendly fire" on a hapless company. As the name of Director Karel Reisz disappears, an explosion almost kills Correspondent John Converse (Michael Moriarty), the "enabler" of the story. Interspersed with images of carnage caused by the mistaken shelling, we see John, and hear his voice, as he writes a letter to his wife Marge (Tuesday Weld, in another extraordinary performance) about the madness he is asked to rationalize in his reporting from Vietnam.

John Converse is a disillusioned Liberal, a failed idealist, who has had enough, has sold out to the corrupting world around him, and has hatched a plan to cash in before his losses become too great. He has agreed to act as a go-between for some powerful unknowns, transporting two kilos of heroin from Vietnam to the U.S.A. In order to accomplish this feat, he has enlisted the help of his old Marine buddy, Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte).

Hicks succeeds in smuggling the dope back to Berkeley, where Marge, a clerk in her father's bookstore, is to give him a thousand dollars for his trouble. What John and Ray do not know is that Marge, in her loneliness and despair, has developed a habit for prescription drugs. And what none of them realize is that John's caper is being monitored by a gang of C.I.A. rogue cowboys.

The last half of WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN is a chase as Ray and Marge are pursued south to LA by the gang led by Antheil (Anthony Zerbe), who has captured John upon his return to the ZI. Along the way, the couple hides Marge's daughter, attempt to sell the dope and fall in love, but to keep her going Ray addicts her to heroin. They end up in a shoot out at an abandoned hippie commune in New Mexico (actually shot in the Mexican Sonoran desert near Durango).

Zerbe, a masterful actor, (once star of The Civic Shakespeare Theater in San Diego), conveys that slimy combination of educated civility and brutal venality the Nation learned to recognize in the minions of Watergate. He is abetted by a pair of henchmen (Richard Mazur and an unrecognizable Ray Sharkey), both comic and banal in their villainy.

As I say, this work is not a conventional War Movie. The melodrama is undercut, as it is in all the best novels of Robert Stone, and remarkably deft scenes reveal the carelessness of the Army abroad, the physically maimed and morally destroyed lives of the soldiers in the field, and the social rot undermining the family and institutions of the society at home. We see how the covert war became part of the criminal underworld in Vietnam and the United States. These are events we have never fully accepted nor understood, and their effects remain with us to this very day.

With more economy than APOCALYPSE NOW (Coppola, 1979), and more Art than PLATOON (Stone, 1986), this little film explains, in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination, how our Nation lost its dream of becoming a moral society and was directed on a course of renewed materialism; how we became a people eaten alive with joyless greed, insincere compassion, and fraudulent patriotism.

Natural sound takes the place of a musical score through much of this film. (Songs by Credence Clearwater Revival, who give the film its title, are suggested by car radios, for instance.) Two key scenes, however, are scored for full orchestra. Both are powerful metaphors focused on Ray Hicks, as portrayed by Nick Nolte in the first great motion picture role of his career. Hicks represents the flagging but fierce honor of the American Marine Hero.

In the first of these scenes, we see Hicks practicing Tai Chi as he guards the dope on the pitching deck of a cargo vessel returning him to America. The music swells in an ominous Wagnerian paean. The Superman who will become an anti-hero is about to invade our Country.

Near the end of the film, the musical theme returns, minor keys undermining its heroic strength, as Hicks, bleeding to death as a result of the shoot-out, still guarding the dope, jody-steps down an endless railway track across the desert to rendezvous with his Marine buddy John and his junkie paramour Marge.

It is, I believe, one of the great scenes in American Motion Pictures.

Hicks on that railway track, of course, is Beat Hero Neal Cassidy marching to his death from exposure in the same landscape a few years earlier. For Robert Stone, the producer and, from his novel, co-writer of the screenplay, is the most talented of "The Merry Pranksters" of Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), famous in the early 1970's for their Art and Antics on a free wheeling bus. Stone took turns with Cassidy driving that bus. The track also reminds us of the end of another great anti-heroic guardian of treasure, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (Huston, 1948).

Stone's first novel Hall of Mirrors, set in New Orleans, and covertly about a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, was made into the unsuccessful WUSA (1970) by Paul Newman. Stone, disappointed, decided to take a hand at turning his second book, Dog Soldiers, into WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN. Since then, he has continued to write prize winning fiction about the shambles of our Nation. One of them, Children of Light, appears to be based, at least in part, on his experiences producing WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN in Mexico.

I recommend this film and all Robert Stone's novels to you.

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For a Macresarf1 Review of a film about an earlier, somewhat less admirable Ray Hicks, try THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (Huston, 1948):

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-789F-7C6E403-393ECCCB-prod3

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If you wish to explore a majority of Macresarf1's reviews, indexed by title and category, many with URL's, go to the following hyperlink --

http://www.epinions.com/content_2514526340




Recommended: Yes