Dry Spell in Texas

Baby the Rain Must Fall is a synthetic little Southern drama, all fancied up with yokel color and art-film flourish. The folksiness carries over from Scenarist Horton Foote's Broadway and TV play, The Traveling Lady. The flourishes must be charged to Producer Alan Pakula and Director Robert Mulligan who were teamed more happily in such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Love with the Proper Stranger.

Most of Rain's inaction takes place smack-dab in Columbus, Texas, where Georgette (Lee Remick) toils as a carhop at the Magnolia Drive-in. Her no-good husband Henry (Steve McQueen) is a parolee who heads a string band and hankers to get famous with his songs, like Elvis Presley. Georgette jes' wants a home for her daughter, Margaret Rose. But all they do to achieve their small-town dreams is fidget on sunbaked street corners, wearing plain cotton. Or maybe they stare at each other, sort of hungry-like, creating pauses so long and wide a hundred head of cattle could amble right through them.

Poverty could be quite poetic, though (the shoot of a chinaberry tree has been planted hopefully in the wasteland), if it wasn't for Miss Kate, the spinster guardian who keeps threatening to have Henry sent back to prison if he don't give up that fool music. When Miss Kate dies, Henry flies into a necro-filial rage and attacks the poor soul in her very grave. That sort of thing makes a bad impression in Columbus, Texas. Soon Georgette and her daughter are alone again, smiling through their tears as the young deputy Mr. Slim (Don Murray) drives them out of town toward The Valley. Of course, evrabody knows where The Valley is. Lies somewhere between lofty Faulkner country and the Foote hills.

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