A HATFUL OF RAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 950, 25 October 1957, Page 16

A HATFUL OF RAIN

(20th Century-Fox) RR: 16 and over ‘THE day Johnny Pope’s father turned up at his son’s New York apartment there. was nothing in the welcome of Johnny’s wife, Celia, to suggest that her husband was a drug addict. Why should there be, when Celia herself didn’t know? Instead, she put Johnny’s strangeness down to another woman, That was .the sort of fog through which they saw each other in quarrels that reached their raw nerve ends-and that almost reach ours. So A Hatful of Rain is not only about drug addiction: it illuminates also the relations between all its principal characters-between Johnny. and his wife, between Johnny and his brother, Polo, who lives in the same apartment, between Polo and Celia, and between the boys and their inadequate but demanding father. Nor is it without significance that Johnny’s breakdown is touched off by war service in Korea, and that Polo, in a terrific scene which will be funny only to the unimaginative (quite ‘a number in the audience I saw it with), seeks escape in drink. Because the Popes are ordinary decent people, A Hatful of Rain never seems so very remote from our experience ("There but for the grace of God .. ."), and éor that reason it should interest many different kinds of filmgoers. Played out in the streets and apartments of the big city-which is strikingly photographed and seldom in my experience more dreadful as a place to live in-it brings together a cast which: never looks less than distinguished. Eva Marie Saint (of On the Waterfront) is Celia, Don Murray (of Bus Stop) is Johnny, Lloyd Nolan is the father, Anthony Franciosa is Polo, and Henry Silva, Gerald O’Loughlin and William Hickey are a drug pusher and his hangers-on-a terrible trio. Michael Vincente Gazzo, author of the original play, wrote the script with Alfred Hayes; and the director is Fred Zinnemann, who has not, I think, made a bad picture and has made many good ones. Of these A Hatful of Rain is one of the best.