New Picture

The Rainmaker (Hal Wollis; Paramount). Most modern audiences seem to enjoy a good sermon--as long as it preaches what they practice. They are also increasingly symbol-minded--provided the symbols do not excite the mental so much as the sentimental faculties ("It isn't enough that boy meets girl," one playwright complained. "Now they want to know what he metaphor"). They also have a kindly feeling of superiority for an old maid--if she isn't too old. And everybody loves a cowboy picture.

All of these old-hat tricks were cleverly combined by Playwright N. Richard Nash in The Rainmaker, a pleasant bit of focus-pocus that scored high on TV, and then ran for 3 1/2 months on Broadway during the 1954-55 season. Sold to Hollywood for $350,000, the play has now been made into one of the most warmly appealing romantic comedies of the season.

Playwright Nash, who also wrote the film script, tells a story "about droughts that happen to people," and about how the rains come to a dust-bowl daisy named Lizzie Curry (Katharine Hepburn). Lizzie is a girl who believes she is "as plain as old shoes," and that no man would want to have her underfoot. Nevertheless, she can't help wanting to be there. "Pride? I ran out of that a long time ago," she tells her father (Cameron Prud'Homme) and two brothers (Lloyd Bridges and Earl Holliman). "I just want to be a woman." They rush into town and, in a hilarious parody of the old John Alden bit, invite the deputy sheriff (Wendell Corey) out to supper. The sheriff lends a helping hand. "You need somethin' warm up against yer backside at night," he declares. "Last night," the deputy doubtfully recalls, "was 104 degrees."

Instead of the deputy, a stranger (Burt Lancaster) comes to supper--a rip-roaring young buckaroo, part prophet and part pitchman, with the natural force of a Kansas twister and much the same blowhard approach. The stranger soon has the house in an uproar and Lizzie's head in a whirl with his promise to bring the rain their crops need, and with his threat to awaken the love her heart fears and longs for. Price: $100. "Electrify the cold front!" he cries. "Neutralize the warm front! Barometricize the tropopause!" Says Lizzie: "Bunk!" But the rainmaker has an answer for that. "Lady, you're right! . . . But you gotta take my deal because once in your life you gotta take a chance." And her father goes along with that. "You gotta take a whole chance without bein' afraid of gettin' hurt or gettin' cheated or gettin' laughed at."

Lizzie takes her chance, and strangely it turns out that the chance she takes is the chance she gets, that the grace he has given is the grace he has received. For the first time in his life, somebody believes he can really make rain; and for the first time in his life, he really can.

The philosophy, for all The Rainmaker's deluge of it, is not much deeper than a puddle, and the moviegoer can usually slosh ahead without bogging down. Then too, Director Joseph Anthony keeps his actors moving nimbly along. Actor Lancaster does a businesslike job as the rainmaker. Prud'Homme and Holliman are excellent as the father and the younger brother. Actress Hepburn does not always surely suggest the stages in Lizzie's life, as she passes from emotional chrysalis to vivid imaginal maturity, but she holds the eye in scene after scene like a brilliant moth as she batters wildly about one or another light o' love. Most welcome in her performance is the restraint put on the all-too-well-known Hepburn mannerisms--apparently by Director Anthony, a man who once heated up an old chestnut and hurled it at another overactive ac tress: "Look, dear, don't just do something, stand there!"

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