The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969)

I wish Coppola took his desire to make an Antonioni-style art film all the way to a deflated ending. Instead, he indulged in the most final and banal ending imaginable with the death of a major character. Still, it's not as if loose ends are tied up for Shirley Knight's disgruntled wife/expectant mother on the run. And overall, The Rain People tells an alarmingly loose tale even for its time. The narrative drift can be summarized in the scene where James Caan's pastured football hero waits at a bus station not for any buses but because that's where people wait. No one here knows what they want and the mercurial behavior and lengthy, nerve-wracked conversations keep this road movie charged up. Knight, Caan, and Robert Duvall are all actorly to the nth but somehow not showy, called upon as they are to "appear as ordinary as Coppola's turnpike, motel room, green hills."* Fresher than The Godfather if only by virtue of still being so little seen. 

Grade: A-minus

* Ethan Mordden: Medium Cool - The Movies of the 1960s, p. 258.