A HATFUL OF RAIN – Eva Marie Saint, Don Murray
A Hatful of Rain (1957)
Direction: Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay: Michael V. Gazzo, Alfred Hayes, Carl Foreman (originally uncredited); from Gazzo’s play
Cast: Eva Marie Saint, Don Murray, Anthony Franciosa, Lloyd Nolan, Henry Silva
Based on a play by Michael V. Gazzo, A Hatful of Rain is an interesting attempt at injecting "adult" subject matters — in this case, the evils of drug addiction — into Hollywood movies. "Interesting," however, does not mean either successful or compelling.
Despite real, unromantic New York locations and Joseph MacDonald’s beautifully realistic black-and-white camera work, this Fred Zinnemann-directed melodrama feels anachronistically stagy because of the overall artificiality of the dialogue and the hammy theatricality of the performances — with Eva Marie Saint as the sole naturalistic exception.
Somewhat revolutionary in its day (The Man with a Golden Arm, also about drug addiction, had come out two years prior), A Hatful of Rain depicts the plight of a young Korean War veteran, Johnny Pope (Don Murray), who has become addicted to morphine after (it is implied) his stay as a patient at a military hospital.
Oblivious to her husband’s addiction, Johnny’s pregnant wife, Celia (Saint), is concerned that her increasingly distant husband is having an affair. At that point, the self-immersed John Pope, Sr., (Lloyd Nolan), arrives in town to make things even more complicated for the young Popes and for Johnny’s younger brother, the aimless Polo (Anthony Franciosa).
Throughout the course of the film, family dynamics are reshaped as John Sr. discovers that Polo possesses unsuspected generosity and inner strength, while the-boy-most-likely-to Johnny turns out to be the one in dire need of assistance.
(In one revealing scene, John Pope, Sr., laughingly recalls that years earlier, on a rainy day, the young Johnny had taken his hat out while working in a field. Having been told that hard work led to financial rewards, Johnny would do a little work and then he would look for money in his pocket. After several failed attempts at finding money, a disheartened Johnny put his water-filled hat back on and got all wet. A hatful of rain was all he got for his hard day’s work. Things obviously didn’t get much better for Johnny when he became an adult.)
Perhaps best known for his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Godfather Part II, actor-writer Michael V. Gazzo adapted his own play to the big screen, with the assistance of two-time Academy Award nominee Alfred Hayes and (uncredited) blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman (he of High Noon and The Bridge on the River Kwai). The trio (or any one of them) did a solid job of opening up the play, but they forgot to make the dialogue sound more true to life — a not uncommon occurrence in stage-to-film adaptations of the 1950s.
Maybe because nearly every line screams theater!, Anthony Franciosa, Don Murray, and Lloyd Nolan act as if they were performing onstage to those sitting in the last row. As mentioned above, among the four leads only Eva Marie Saint manages against all odds to deliver an unaffected performance.
Had Saint been a lazy actress, she could easily have played Celia — sad, afraid, lonely — as a victim begging for our sympathy, but instead of emphasizing Celia’s victimhood, Saint’s portrayal focuses on her character’s honesty and dependability to excellent effect. The only problem with her subdued performance is that it seems completely out of place in the film’s scenery-chewing orgies.
Admittedly, Don Murray displays a vulnerable, honest quality that makes Johnny quite likable, and in his "normal" moments Murray’s performance is thoroughly believable. But once the shaking starts, Johnny looks as if he’s being possessed by the lambada demon; in no way does he resemble a drug addict desperately in need of a fix. Besides, Murray looks much too handsome and healthy to be convincing as a down-and-out junkie.
Anthony Franciosa, best actor winner at the Venice Film Festival and Oscar nominee for reprising his Tony-nominated stage role (opposite future wife Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara), has some adequate moments, but the actor is incapable of delivering his stilted lines without sounding, well, stilted.
Lloyd Nolan, for one, doesn’t even try. His is an old-fashioned performance that seems to have been transported from the early, clunky days of sound films to the late 1950s. Nolan relishes the artificiality of the dialogue, declaiming each word to calculated effect while adding his own grandiose exclamation points as the mayo on the ham. (Nolan’s character does have one good speech, decrying The Age of the Vacuum: a time when no one takes responsibility for anything, no one pays attention to anything, no one takes a stand for or against anything. It sounds like the early 21st century, but he’s actually referring to the 1950s.)
Even though the screenwriters are surely at fault, most of the blame for the general inadequacy of the cast must go to director Fred Zinnemann, who by that time — he had already won an Academy Award, for From Here to Eternity — should have learned how to control his actors.
By letting them run loose, Zinnemann allows the tragic truth of A Hatful of Rain — a self-absorbed society’s utter disregard for the fate of a war veteran — to disappear under the histrionics of his cast.
Saint valiantly tries to bring a core of truth to the proceedings, but she’s one lone fighter battling hammy actors, a misguided director, and even Bernard Herrmann’s obnoxious jazzy score. In A Hatful of Rain, Saint could easily have become a film martyr — except that she comes out on top in this one.
Academy Award Nomination
Best Actor: Anthony Franciosa
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Tags: A Hatful of Rain, Anthony Franciosa, Classic Movies, Don Murray, Eva Marie Saint, Film Reviews, Fred Zinnemann, Lloyd Nolan, Michael V. Gazzo, Oscar 1957, Oscar Movies
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