The Rain People

Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight) sets off on a drive in a family station wagon. She gives a ride to a strapping young man, Killer (James Caan), who had been a college football star but had sustained a serious head injury and was given one thousand dollars to go away.

On their first night together, in Natalie’s motel room, she orders Killer around and makes him show her his muscular body. She tells him she is pregnant and had given him the ride to have a one-night affair with him, but then she sends him to his own room.

Natalie drives Killer to the home of a one-time girlfriend of his whose father had once promised him a job, but that family wants nothing to do with him and Natalie takes him with her when she drives away. While they travel west she twice comes close to finding him work and a place to stay, only to decide that Killer would be taken advantage of. She also twice leaves him at the side of the road, only to change her mind.

At their next stop Natalie makes a collect phone call and it is revealed that she left a husband at home when she took off. During a subsequent call days later her husband pleads with her to return home, saying he will do anything to make her happy.

Things become complicated when Natalie gets involved with a handsome but lonely highway patrolman, Gordon (Robert Duvall), and after a night out he takes her back to his place.

• Shirley Knight as Natalie Ravenna
• James Caan as Jimmy "Killer" Kilgannon
• Robert Duvall as Gordon
• Marya Zimmet as Rosalie
• Tom Aldredge as Mr. Alfred
• Laura Crews as Ellen
• Andrew Duncan as Artie
• Margaret Fairchild as Marion
• Sally Gracie as Beth
• Alan Manson as Lou
• Robert Modica as Vinny Ravenna
• Rain Manuel lavitoria

At the time, Duvall and Caan lived with each other and were doing a few films together. Later, they and Coppola teamed for the film The Godfather.

The film features about 2-minutes and 44 seconds of footage filmed on the streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee amid the city's annual Armed Forces Parade. A majority of the clips were shot near the main intersection of what is today Martin Luther King Boulevard and Market Street.[2]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and compared Natalie Ravenna's quest to that of the Peter Fonda character in Easy Rider, and called them both "lineal descendants of the most typical American searcher of them all, Huckleberry Finn." He concluded: "It's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors. They'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie."[3]

According to TVGuide.com: "This odd odyssey was not a hit, even though over the years it has been regarded as one of Coppola's more personal pictures and has attained a limited following."[4] Margarita Landazuri writes on TCM.com: "It has acquired a cult status as an early feminist film for its provocative treatment of a woman seeking her own identity."[5] The work currently has an 82% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[6] In 2015, David Canfield named The Rain People as one of Coppola's five best films, calling it "hypnotic".[7]

• List of American films of 1969

• The Rain People at IMDb
• The Rain People at Rotten Tomatoes