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| THE RAINMAKER (1956) |
A Paramount Picture
Technicolor, 121 minutes
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CAST
Starbuck: Burt Lancaster
Lizzie Curry: Katharine Hepburn
File: Wendell Corey
Noah Curry: Lloyd Bridges
Jim Curry: Earl Holliman
H.C. Curry: Cameron Prud'Homme
Sheriff Thomas: Wallace Ford
Snookie: Yvonne Lime
Belinda: Dottie Bee Baker
Deputy: Dan White
Townsmen: Stan Jones, John Benson, James Stone, Tony Merrill, Joe Brown
Phil Mackey: Ken Becker
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CREDITS
Director: Joseph Anthony
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Associate Producer: Paul Nathan
Scenarist: N. Richard Nash
Based on the Play by: N. Richard Nash
Photographer: Charles Lang Jr.
Art Director: Hal Pereira
Associate Art Director: Walter Tyler
Set Decorator: Sam Coner
Associate Set Decorator: Arthur Krams
Editor: Warren Low
Sound Recorders: Harold Lewis, Winston Leverett
Musical Score: Alex North
Costumer: Edith Head
Makeup Artist: Wally Westmore
Hair Stylist: Nellie Manley
Special Photographic Effects: John P. Fulton
Assistant Director: C.C. Coleman Jr.
Technicolor Color Consultant: Richard Mueller
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SYNOPSIS
Lizzie Curry, a frightened spinster who has a father and two brothers to care for in their drought-plagued farm outside a small southwestern town, is seemingly content in her day-to-day existence. Into Lizzie's world comes a sweet-talking, brash young conman, named Starbuck, who not boasts that he can bring rain to the area for just $100, but also convinces Lizzie that she is more of a woman than she herself believes. He transforms her into a woman ready for love.
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CRITIQUES
"In her portrait of a cow-town spinster, Miss Hepburn never entirely convinces us that she really is just a homely little primitive, but she does succeed in obtaining full lachrymal measure from the plight of a woman who wants a man in the worst way and doesn't know how to go about capturing one. As her clodhopping Svengali, Mr. Lancaster is most engaging and whether he is enlightening her about her formidable potentialities as a female or shilling the yokels into believing that he can make rain, he is a believable character."
- The New Yorker, 1956
"In the hands of Katharine Hepburn, who plays this impressionable dame; Burt Lancaster, who plays the faker, and three or four other would-be clowns, this simple and saucy country whimsy gets squeezed so strenuously that it squirts in a dozen directions and splashes humor and sentiment all over the place....Miss
Hepburn, who has done her farce performing on a somewhat higher social scale, is nothing daunted by the requirement of doing it as a rube. And even though her manners are quite airy for the Corn Belt and her accent suspiciously Bryn Mawr, she holds her own better than even with a bunch of voracious clowns."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1956
"The cowtown spinster suffering from drought is Katharine Hepburn, and the man who delivers the rain is Burt Lancaster. The casting is just about perfect. Lancaster has an athletic role, in which he can also be very touching. His con man isn't a simple trickster; he's a poet and dreamer who needs to convince people of his magical powers. Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain yet magnetically beautiful. This is a fairy tale (the ugly duckling) dressed up as a bucolic comedy and padded out with metaphysical falsies, but it is also genuinely appealing, in a crude, good-spirited way, though N. Richard Nash, who wrote both the play and the adaptation, aims too solidly at lower-middle-class tastes. Once transformed, the heroine rejects the poet for the deputy sheriff (Wendell Corey); if there were a sequel, she might be suffering from the drought of his imagination. The director is Joseph Anthony, who also staged it on Broadway; the movie barely exists as a movie, but if you accept it as an 'opened-out' play it's highly enjoyable."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"It's barely a movie, but Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster make something lightly memorable out of N. Richard Nash's stage play about a flinty Kansas spinster and a traveling con man who promises to make the land green again. The implications may be horribly obvious, but the performances are not."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"Kate is intolerant of unprofessional behavior, and with Burt Lancaster, there was trouble. He was late on the set the first day and she gave him hell. She walked into the centre of the sound stage and said: 'I'm here; all these people are here; and if you're not going to be here on time we can't work.' He learned his lesson and was on time for the rest of the shooting. She attributes her punctuality to a childhood experience she's never forgotten. Her family was ready for a trip to Virginia - six of them in two cars. Her father drove off because the children were late. Now she says, 'I think punctuality is something you learn young. Now I'm either on time or early. I think when one is late, it shows you don't care for the person you're meeting.'"
- Hal Wallis, Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis, 1980
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HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
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NTSC Standard:
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Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster
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On the set: Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Anthony
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On the set: Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster
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