A HATFUL OF RAIN Review – Eva Marie Saint, Don Murray, Anthony Franciosa

A HATFUL OF RAIN (1957)

Direction: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Eva Marie Saint, Don Murray, Anthony Franciosa, Lloyd Nolan, Henry Silva

Screenplay: Michael V. Gazzo, Alfred Hayes, Carl Foreman (originally uncredited); from Gazzo's play

Oscar Movies

Don Murray, Eva Marie Saint, A Hatful of Rain

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 as a result of its artificial dialogue and the hammy theatricality of its performers — with Eva Marie Saint as the sole naturalistic exception.

Somewhat revolutionary in its day (Otto Preminger's 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. Right then, 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 for the big screen, relying on the assistance of two-time Academy Award nominee Alfred Hayes and (uncredited) blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman (High Noon, 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 (e.g., The Bad Seed, Tea and Sympathy).