SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This is a film that when you say James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Shirley Knight, with Francis Ford Coppola writing and directing, you'd expect an 8 or 9 rating. When you watch the film, it does not quite live up to the sum of these parts. There are a few reasons. Shirley Knight is brilliant, and her character is addressing the issue of Roe V Wade (1973) here 4 years before the court decision. I credit Coppola for bringing that into the plot. What gets hard to understand is that she runs away because she is pregnant from her husband, not sure if she is going to be a good mother, and not sure of anything it seems. The script has her calling her husband, yet it does not really explain if she loves her husband, though I suspect not. James Caan is very good as the brain damaged football player whose nickname is killer and who has been given $1,000 to leave the college he got injured in a game at. It is not a big dialogue role which had to be tough for the talkative Caan but he brings it off pretty well. Duvall is the lonely cop whose wife died in a fire and comes into the picture pulling Knight over for speeding and decides he wants to use Knight to replace the departed one.Knight's conflict in my opinion is not explained well enough and that is the weakness in this one. If that were explained better, the film would hook the viewer more. Because of her considerable talent Shirley does hook the viewer in late in the film, but if the hook had come earlier, this would be a batter film.While this film does feature a dream Wedding Sequence with Knight's husband. The sequence uses the same music as is used at weddings in the Godfather films. There is some foreshadowing for Coppola. This is a good film, that is just a little short of being a great film. While the parts should have made it, the results do not.

Shirley Knight as Natalie Ravenna, an overwhelmed and bored suburban NY housewife who decides, upon realizing she is pregnant, that this is all there is. A mind-numbing stagnant life. She decides to hit the road, aimlessly in her station wagon to think, to figure things out.En route she picks up brain-damaged former football player James Cann. He is functional, but naive about life in a sad way. He isn't really aware of the inhumanity man in general is capable of. We see a pastiche of American rural landscape, small towns, parades (around the Fourth of July) and the vastness of landscape as Natalie drives through stark open plains, parts of Kansas, Nebraska, etc. She figures she will stop in California as it is as "far as she can go".Robert Duvall a local sheriff pulls her over for speeding in Kansas and for some reason she has to pay the speeding fine immediately or be held in jail. A rather silly premise, but anyway. Duvall is interested in her, she decides to put on some makeup and at least have a night out.Duvall lives in an airstream trailer with a rather manic and annoying young daughter. When he realizes he isn't going to get anything from Natalie (she refuses to stay the night), he eventually becomes violent.Without spoiling the ending for the audience, basically this film is interesting in parts, a bit disturbing (we see the sadness and randomness in life, as in when Cann tries to work at an animal farm/petting zoo. The animals, chicks, rabbits, goats, lambs etc. are abused, and he decides to save them).The story is realistic in that it reflects a segment of life everyone has dealt with. The emotions Ms. Knight conveys, even by not speaking are apparent. She feels sad for Cann, but realizes her future lies in conformity. Recommended. 8/10.

Just caught "The Rain People" on Turner Classic Movies late one night. The film was released in 1969. Shirley Knight stars as Natalie, a Long Island housewife who -- exact reasons unknown -- leaves her husband and embarks on a road trip, not knowing exactly where she is going. Natalie is also newly pregnant, which complicates things. Along the way, she picks up a brain-damaged ex-football player "Jimmy" (James Caan), who has been kicked out of his college and is hitchhiking. There are many twists and turns along the way between these two, as Natalie struggles to take care of Jimmy and she begins to realize he is mentally limited and cannot take care of himself. She is going through her own struggles, needless to say, and in no position to care for him. Natalie appears to be a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown at times; she makes some odd phone calls to her husband, who begs her to come home. Natalie tries to dump Jimmy several times, only to have him re-enter her life through circumstances. A young Robert Duvall plays a strange and troubled cop who befriends Natalie. You get the sense all along that this film is going to end badly, and it does. This film is certainly uneven at times, and the script is somewhat lacking. Francis Ford Coppola directed this, and of course he would soon become immensely famous in the next few years for directing "The Godfather." The actors are good ones, needless to say, as they all would have futures ahead of them in film. Shirley Knight is the least known of the three, although she is also underrated as an actor. James Caan is especially effective here and he seems to just inhabit this character. This film remains little more than a curiosity now, no doubt because it is an early movie of Coppola's, and I confess I had never heard of it. So God bless Turner Classic Movies for bringing it to a new audience.

Early Coppola with sublime cast that most folks never got to see (a pity). There's some wonderful things going on in this one - Shirley Knight's best performance (an underrated actress), a road trip in the late 1960's, James Caan very restrained and moving, Robert Duvall in a part he was born to play (edgy, lonely, motorcycle cop), and a touching script with F. Coppola behind the wheel.If this had been made five years LATER by some nobody, it would have been a smash (so much for timing). Anyway, I recommend this to all people who don't need outer-space explosions and bad mother-in-law jokes or a billion dollar budget to sit for a few hours and watch a story unfold. Give this one a chance if you can find it!