A Hatful of Rain (1957): Eva Marie Saint Withstands Ham Onslaught

A Hatful of Rain with Don Murray and Eva Marie Saint: Like a number of other stage-to-film transfers of the 1950s, Fred Zinnemann’s big-screen version of Michael V. Gazzo’s play about an all-American drug addict and his dysfunctional family fails to disguise its theatrical roots.

A Hatful of Rain (1957) review: Despite the always reliable Eva Marie Saint, Fred Zinnemann’s big-screen adaptation of drug addiction play fails to find its cinematic voice

Released two years after Otto Preminger’s blockbuster The Man with the Golden Arm, in which Frank Sinatra becomes addicted to (what is clearly) heroin, Fred Zinnemann’s 1957 dysfunctional family drama A Hatful of Rain is a curious attempt at injecting an “adult” subject matter – once again, drug addiction – into Production Code-crippled Hollywood movies.

“Curious,” however, does not mean either successful or compelling.

Despite authentic, unromantic New York City locations and Joseph MacDonald’s beautifully realistic black-and-white camera work (let’s ignore the pointless use of CinemaScope), A Hatful of Rain’s stagy dialogue and the theatricality of most of its performances give away the origins of this big-screen transfer of Michael V. Gazzo’s 1955 Broadway play.

In point of fact – and notwithstanding Anthony Franciosa’s Best Actor Venice win and Academy Award nomination – Eva Marie Saint (Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for On the Waterfront, 1954) is the movie’s sole naturalistic cast member.

Stagy drama

Perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated acting turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II, Michael V. Gazzo was credited for the adaptation of his play, alongside two-time Oscar nominee Alfred Hayes (Paisà, 1949; Teresa, 1951) and Hollywood Blacklist victim Carl Foreman (High Noon, The Bridge on the River Kwai), whose A Hatful of Rain script co-authorship would be officially acknowledged by the Writers Guild of America only in 1998.

The trio – or any one of them (it’s unclear who was responsible for what) – did a solid job opening up the play even while unnecessarily transforming a working-class Italian-American family into a lower-middle-class, fuzzily Anglo-American one.

On the downside, they forgot to make the characters’ lines more true to life while director Zinnemann forgot to make the actors’ line delivery less stilted, a not uncommon occurrence in stage-to-film adaptations of the 1950s (e.g., Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed and Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, both 1956 releases).

A Hatful of Rain plot: U.S. war veterans’ burden

At times reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s socially conscious family plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, A Hatful of Rain features a young Korean War veteran, Johnny Pope (real-life conscientious objector Don Murray; played by Tony nominee Ben Gazzara on stage), who has become addicted to morphine after (it is implied) his stay as a patient at a military hospital.

Oblivious to Johnny’s addiction, his pregnant wife, Celia (Eva Marie Saint; Shelley Winters on stage), is concerned that her increasingly distant husband is having an affair.

Right then, the self-immersed John Pope, Sr., (Lloyd Nolan; Frank Silvera on stage), arrives in town to make things more complicated for the young Pope couple and for Johnny’s younger brother, the aimless Polo (Anthony Franciosa, reprising his Tony-nominated stage role, which, for the movie version, had been initially offered to Don Murray).

Throughout the course of the film, family dynamics are reshaped as John Sr. discovers that Polo possesses unsuspected generosity and inner strength, while boy-most-likely-to Johnny turns out to be the one in dire need of assistance.

In one revealing scene, the Pope patriarch laughingly recalls that years earlier, on a rainy day, the boy 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 look for money in his pocket. Following several failed attempts at finding money, the disheartened boy put his rainwater-filled hat back on and got drenched.

Despite the much-touted American prosperity of the postwar years, things obviously didn’t get much better for Johnny – and others like him – after he became an adult.

A Hatful of Rain 1957 with Don Murray and Eva Marie Saint: Post-World War II prosperity for some, but definitely not for all.

Naturalistic Eva Marie Saint

Maybe because nearly every line in A Hatful of Rain screams theater!, Don Murray, Anthony Franciosa, and Lloyd Nolan act as if they were performing onstage for those sitting in the last row of the gallery.

As mentioned further up, only Eva Marie Saint, one of the best (and, absurdly, least used) film stars of the 1950s and 1960s – see not only On the Waterfront, but also North by Northwest, 36 Hours, and Grand Prix – manages to deliver a sincere, unaffected performance.

Had Saint been a lazy actress, she could have played Celia – sad, confused, afraid, lonely – as a victim begging for our sympathy. But instead of emphasizing Celia’s suffering, Saint’s portrayal focuses on her character’s honesty and dependability. The only problem with her naturalistic work is that it seems completely out of place during the film’s scenery-chewing orgies.

Admittedly, Don Murray (Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for Bus Stop, 1956) – excellent in films as disparate as Advise & Consent and Endless Love – displays a vulnerability that makes Johnny unquestionably appealing. Once the shaking starts, however, in no way does Johnny resemble a drug addict in need of a fix.

Compounding matters, Murray looks much too healthy and handsome in A Hatful of Rain to be convincing as a down-and-out junkie.

‘The Age of the Vacuum’

Anthony Franciosa – who had made his film debut that same year in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd – has several adequate moments in A Hatful of Rain, but the Broadway-trained actor is mostly incapable of delivering his stagy lines without sounding, well, as if he were performing on stage.

Lloyd Nolan, by then a Hollywood actor for more than two decades, doesn’t even try. His is an old-fashioned characterization that seems to have been transported from the early, clunky days of sound films to the late 1950s. Nolan relishes in the artificiality of the dialogue, declaiming each word to calculated effect while adding his own grandiose exclamation points as the mayo on the ham.

Now, in all fairness, Nolan’s John Pope, Sr., has one good speech. That’s when he decries “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 may sound just like the early 21st century, but he’s actually referring to the post-World War II era.

Fred Zinnemann knew better

Although the screenwriters are undeniably responsible for A Hatful of Rain’s theatrical feel, 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 Oscar for From Here to Eternity – should have learned how to control his actors.

By letting them run loose, Zinnemann allows the tragedy of A Hatful of Rain – a self-absorbed society’s utter disregard for the fate of its “freedom warriors” – to be wholly overpowered by the histrionics of his cast.

Eva Marie Saint valiantly tries to bring some heartfelt truth to the proceedings, but she’s one lone fighter battling stilted lines, hammy actors, a misguided director, and even Bernard Herrmann’s obnoxious jazzy score. In A Hatful of Rain, Saint could easily have become one more movie martyr – except that she comes out on top in this one.

A Hatful of Rain (1957) cast & crew

Director: Fred Zinnemann.

Screenplay: Michael V. Gazzo, Alfred Hayes, and Carl Foreman (originally uncredited).
From Michael V. Gazzo’s 1955 play.

Cast:
Eva Marie Saint … Celia Pope
Don Murray … Johnny Pope
Anthony Franciosa … Polo Pope
Lloyd Nolan … John Pope, Sr.
Henry Silva … Mother
Gerald S. O’Loughlin … Chuch
William Hickey … Apples

According to online sources, uncredited cast members include:
Michael Vale … Cab driver
Norman Willis … John
Jason Johnson … Ross
William Tannen … Executive

Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald.

Film Editing: Dorothy Spencer.

Music: Bernard Herrmann.

Producer: Buddy Adler.

Production Design: Lyle Wheeler and Leland Fuller.

Costume Design: Mary Wills and Charles Le Maire (executive wardrobe designer).

Production Company | Distributor: 20th Century Fox.

Running Time: 109 min.

Country: United States.

“A Hatful of Rain (1957): Eva Marie Saint Withstands Ham Onslaught” notes

A Hatful of Rain Academy Awards

A Hatful of Rain received one Academy Award nomination:

• Best Actor (Anthony Franciosa).

TV version

Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey and written by Michael V. Gazzo, a 1968 television version of A Hatful of Rain starred Sandy Dennis (Celia), Michael Parks (Johnny), Peter Falk (Polo), and Herschel Bernardi (John Sr.).

A Hatful of Rain movie credits via the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog website.

Don Murray and Eva Marie Saint A Hatful of Rain movie images: 20th Century Fox.

“A Hatful of Rain (1957): Eva Marie Saint Withstands Ham Onslaught” last updated in December 2023.