Rain. 1932. Directed by Lewis Milestone. Lewis Milestone. Screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, based in turn on the play by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, based on the short story Miss Thompson by William Somerset Maugham. With Joan Crawford, Walter Huston. US restoration premiere. DCP. 94 min.
In celebration of his new book Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face (2025), biographer Scott Eyman presents the January 31 screening of Lewis Milestone’s Rain, a pre-Code tale of religious hypocrisy and sexual violence involving a puritanical missionary in the South Seas (Walter Huston) who tries to save the soul of a prostitute (Crawford). Fresh from his success on All Quiet on the Western Front and The Front Page, Milestone turned to this United Artists sound adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story first made famous on the stage by Jeanne Eagels, and then on the silent screen by Gloria Swanson in Raoul Walsh’s Sadie Thompson. (Future versions would include a Broadway musical, a 3D musical drama starring Rita Hayworth, an opera, and a porno.) Rain has long been virtually unintelligible due to the circulation of poor public-domain copies with garbled soundtracks, but thanks to this meticulous digital restoration, we can finally appreciate Crawford in a pivotal, if uneasy, departure from her more urbane MGM roles, as well as the complex interplay of Milestone’s camerawork with the film’s soundtrack of monsoon rains, growling trumpets, and jungle drums. On January 31 from 6:15-7pm outside Titus 2, Eyman will sign copies of his new book Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face.
Restored in 4K in 2021 by VCI Entertainment, in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Mary Pickford Foundation at VCI Entertainment laboratory, from the picture positive and the positive soundtrack, both created from the nitrate negatives.