The Rain People (1969) is Francis Ford Coppola's early feature film, as part of a PFA series of Zoetrope productions. A woman takes off from her home and husband on an flight west in her station wagon. On the road she meets a young man nicknamed Killer who has sustained a brain injury from football that makes him meek and obedient to her capricious commands. She finds herself angry at having to take responsibility for protecting him from the dangers they encounter on the road, but ultimately her flirtation with a violent cop results in his death. Folks have compared this to Huck Finn, Easy Rider and Of Mice and Men. Making a woman the protagonist who hits the road with a young man as the "innocent" sidekick is a twist on those stories. What the film gets right is her dilemma--feeling trapped in her marriage and pregnancy--and the way she flirts with the power of role reversal when she orders Killer around. She alternately takes a kind of maternal responsibility for him (rescuing him when his attempt to get a job with an ex-girlfriend's father ends up with him subjected to verbal abuse by his ex, rescuing him again when her attempt to get him a job at a grotesque animal zoo goes wrong and he ends up being robbed by the zoo owner after he lets all the animals loose) and attempts to leave him by the side of the road, fleeing from involvement. When the cop tries to rape her, he comes to her rescue but the violence he knows how to inflict as if they are on the football field provokes the cop's young daughter to shoot him with her father's gun (in spite of the verbal and physical abuse we'd just seen the cop inflict on her). I liked the film well enough until the ending which I hated. But I guess if it's an American road film there has to be a gun and a senseless gun death.
The cast includes Shirley Knight, and the young James Caan and Robert Duvall. George Lucas was an was a young assistant, and he made a documentary called Filmmaker about the making of the film.
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