Who’ll Stop the Rain movie storyline. The film opens in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War. John Converse, a disillusioned war correspondent, approaches Ray Hicks, a merchant marine sailor and acquaintance of Converse from the U.S., for help in smuggling a large quantity of heroin from Vietnam to San Francisco, where he will exchange the drugs for payment with Converse’s wife Marge, who has become addicted to Dilaudid.
When Hicks gets back to the U.S. and discovers he is being followed by thugs connected either to Converse or his suppliers, he goes on the run with Marge and the heroin, and eventually they are pursued by corrupt DEA Agent Antheil, who initially set the deal in motion. As Marge is separated from her supply of Dilaudid, she experiences withdrawal, and Hicks decides to help wean her off her addiction by using the heroin. Hicks also attempts to find another buyer for the heroin before his pursuers can catch up to him.
Who’ll Stop the Rain is a 1978 American drama neo noir thriller war film directed by Karel Reisz and starring Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, and Anthony Zerbe. It was released by United Artists and produced by Herb Jaffe and Gabriel Katzka with Sheldon Schrager and Roger Spottiswoode as executive producers. The screenplay was by Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone, based on Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (1974), the music score by Laurence Rosenthal, and the cinematography by Richard H. Kline. The movie was entered in the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.
The film is based on Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (1974), which won the National Book Award (US) for fiction in 1975. For its original US theatrical release it was re-titled Who’ll Stop the Rain, after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, which features prominently (along with several other popular CCR tracks) on the film’s soundtrack. The film was released as Dog Soldiers for release in several foreign territories. Some copies of the DVD of Who’ll Stop the Rain actually contain prints titled Dog Soldiers.
Stone based the character of Ray Hicks on Beat writer Neal Cassady, with whom Stone became acquainted through novelist Ken Kesey, a graduate school classmate of Stone’s at Stanford University. Hicks’ death scene on the railroad tracks at the film’s conclusion is directly based on Cassady’s death along a railroad track outside of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1968.
The hippie commune setting, where lights and stereo speakers placed throughout the woods are utilized in Hicks’ escape plan, is partially based on Kesey’s home in La Honda, California, where Kesey and his friends — known as the Merry Pranksters — famously wired the surrounding woods with lights and sound equipment to enhance their experiments with LSD. The Saigon scenes were filmed on a set in Mexico. There was a casting advertisement in Mexico City for people of any Asian background to represent the Vietnamese.
Soundtrack
Del Reeves – “Philadelphia Fillies”
Jackie DeShannon – “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”
Don McLean – “American Pie”
Slim Whitman – “I’ll Step Down”
Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Hey Tonight”
Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Who’ll Stop the Rain”
Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Proud Mary”
The Spencer Davis Group – “Gimme Some Lovin'”
Hank Snow – “Golden Rocket”
Film Review for Who’ll Stop the Rain
His wife remembers that when John Converse went off to fight the war in Vietnam, he didn’t even know how to roll a joint. So how’d he get her mixed up in this mess? She’s standing in the shambles of her living room. A merchant seaman just came in the back door with two kilos of heroin. Then two federal agents broke into the house, and the seaman used their own handcuffs to manacle them to a toilet and a hot water heater. And now he’s telling her to get the hell out to the car.
What follows is a well-assembled chase movie–a thriller, with a few existential notes left over from Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers the novel the movie’s based on. When it played at Cannes, indeed, it was titled “Dog Soldiers,” but it was retitled “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” maybe because the producers didn’t want people to think this was a war movie, or maybe because they thought the song title would help at the box office.
And yet it is a war movie, in a way; a story of people at war with themselves after the one in Vietnam screwed them up. The merchant seaman (Nick Nolte) made a vow in the Marines that he would never again allow himself to be ordered around by morons, and that vow leads him into a lot of trouble in this movie. The husband (Michael Moriarty) didn’t know beans about the drug scene when he went off to Vietnam, but, as Nolte tells the wife, “he made some new friends.” And the wife (Tuesday Weld) did her part on the home front, by getting hooked on pills.
Stone’s novel encompasses a great deal more than these characters and their attempts to keep possession of the smuggled heroin. It was said at the time that the author had a falling-out with Karel Reisz, the film’s director, about what to throw out and what to keep in. Movies rarely do justice, though, to novels with a complex tapestry, and maybe Reisz (whose credits include the memorably grimy “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960) and “This Sporting Life” (1963), was right to extract the novel’s more thrilling action.
He’s made, in any event, a thriller that really draws us in. Gary Arnold of the Washington Post maybe got slightly carried away in ranking this movie with “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) and “The Wages Of Fear” (1952), but I see what he was getting at: You have the sharply drawn characters, the purity of a brilliantly orchestrated pursuit, and the obsession all the characters feel about the heroin. Humphrey Bogart, in “Sierra Madre,” was obsessed with “the goods” — the gold they’d brought out of the mountains with them. “Who’ll Stop the Rain” also ends with a pursuit through mountains after treasure.
The movie works mostly because it’s so well told on the narrative level; I’m not sure it has anything significant to tell us about Vietnam, drugs or American society. Reisz, whose earlier movies also include “Morgan!” (1966) and the “The Gambler” (1974), isn’t known as an action director, and yet he’s totally assured in his orchestration of the chase, the entrapment, the gun battle and the scenes of violence.
And the performances are right, too. I wouldn’t have guessed (after “The Deep” in 1977) that Nick Nolte had substantial acting talent, but he does here; the movie was the beginning of his serious acting career. He provides a strong center for the movie as the sailor. Tuesday Weld, consistently underrated, has one of her best roles in years as the wife – she could have been lost in the distractions of the violence, but she isn’t. And Michael Moriarty, back after taking a few years off for stage work, is interesting as the husband: An innocent, a little strange, in over his head. You gotta be careful about making new friends.
Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978)
Directed by: Karel Reisz
Starring: Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, Anthony Zerbe, Richard Masur, Ray Sharkey, Gail Strickland, Charles Haid, Joaquín Martínez, Shelby Balik, José Carlos Ruiz
Screenplay by: Judith Rascoe, Robert Stone
Production Design by: Dale Hennesy
Cinematography by: Richard H. Kline
Costume Design by: William Ware Theiss
Set Decoration by: Robert De Vestel
Music by: Laurence Rosenthal
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: August 11, 1978
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