Overview: VCI Entertainment has just-released Rain, celebrating it’s 90 Anniversary in a stunning new 4K restoration, produced from the original, uncut 94-minute version.

It is a most important film in the history of the cinema, and one of the greatest films the Thirties produced. The consummate dramatic and artistic achievement of both Miss Crawford and Walter Huston will give the picture life for many decades to come.

W. Somerset Maugham’s powerful story of Sadie Thompson has perhaps the most celebrated version, vividly capturing the lives of several very different human beings, thrown together on Pago Pago during a fierce monsoon.

Brilliant performances are given by Crawford, as the cynical prostitute, and Huston, as the minister who tries to reform her. A tour de force of camera work, style and direction of a film that caused controversy when first released, Rain is one of the true classic dramas of film history.

4K Blu-ray Verdict: The original source material for this feature was a short-story by Somerset-Maugham published in April 1921 under the title Miss Thompson. Set on the island of Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, the story is, in turn, based indirectly on the author’s prolonged stay there during his December 1916 tour of the Pacific.

Delayed by a quarantine inspection, Somerset-Maugham took lodgings there with fellow passengers including a Miss Thompson and a medical missionary and his wife.

First adapted for the stage under the title Rain, featuring former Ziegfeld girl, Jeanne Eagels, it became a Broadway smash, running for over 600 performances between 1922 and 1924. The material was then brought to the silver screen under a third different title of Sadie Thompson in 1928 starring Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barryman.

Unlike its silent predecessor, this 1932 version would prove to be a commercial failure, losing $200,000 at the box office, while Crawford would dismiss her performance as one of her worst. Given that her other film of that year was the Oscar-heralded Grand Hotel, it is understandable that she would regard this box-office flop as less worthy.

However, it is far more deserving than her cutting remarks would suggest, with Crawford once declaring that, I hope they burn every print of this turkey that’s in existence.

Certainly, this feature came at a time of great personal loss for Crawford, coinciding with the dying embers of her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, whose visits to the set met with her disdain, and the abortion of their child, which Crawford claimed to have lost due to a slip whilst filming.

The MGM star in withdrawing from the rest of the cast as they filmed on Santa Catalina Island, off the Californian coast, appeared aloof, and subsequently, was subject to hate mail from her fans after the film appeared in theaters.

The film is graced, aside from a wonderful score by Alfred Newman, by one of the most noteworthy entrances in cinematic history, with Crawford’s first appearance as prostitute Sadie Thompson preceded by the forcible ejection of the quartermaster from a cabin, quickly followed by an unidentified flying object, and an array of expressions from our four witnesses outside from astonishment to appreciation to unbridled lust.

Then two native-like bejewelled hands and two fishnet-stockinged feet emerge from the cabin, before Crawford is revealed heavily made-up, bedecked in a fox fur and with cigarette insolently dangling from her lips.

Throughout the first half of the movie, Sadie is attired in a checked dress quickly acquired from a store before the costumer, Milo Anderson, realized it would be so extensively used as symbolic of Sadie’s fallen character. Consequently, with them being unable to purchase a second, another had to be laboriously designed from scratch.

Though certain reviewers criticized her as being miscast, in preparation for her role, Crawford had repeatedly hung out with prostitutes from San Diego to study their behaviors and lifestyle. For this reviewer she convinces as this steely, yet vulnerable, woman of disrepute.

This feature was ahead of its time and has since become far more critically valued. Firstly, the adapted screenplay by Maxwell Anderson allowed the dualism of the South Seas setting to come to the forefront, with both the elements and native drums ominously accompanying the main narrative thread.

Right from the outset, this duality is apparent, from the opening shots of the approaching monsoon to the marching Marines acting as a Greek chorus bemoaning, as they trudge through the rain and the mud, the recruiting Sergeant’s promises of a verdant and clean paradise where they could play to their heart’s content.

This is soon mirrored in the script as Doctor MacPhail sardonically notes of his fellow passengers, the evangelizing Mr and Mrs Davidson, their experience of the South Seas will be like a school Ma’am waking up in a harem.

With the newly arrived passengers having to be quarantined on Pago Pago due to a case of cholera, the plot is soon adequately summarized in a dialogue between said doctor and their welcoming host, local store-owner Joe Horn. The latter’s distaste for reformers is summed up his estimation that They’ll break your back to save your soul, while the easy-going doctor philosophically notes that Too bad man couldn’t develop a soul without losing the Garden of Eden.

At the expense of saving the local natives, Mr Davidson soon has as his lost soul to be rescued that of Sadie Thompson.

A second revolutionary aspect of the feature is that whereby director, Lewis Milestone, and his cinematographer, Oliver T Marsh, achieved a visual style that very much lent a naturalistic feel to this play brought to the big screen.

The camera is brought in amongst the players, such as when it accompanies the drunken quartermaster Bates in circuit around the table of disapproving missionaries as he ridicules Walter Huston’s Mr Davidson. Even more impressively the moving camera is used magnificently as almost another protagonist amongst the sparring of Thompson and Davidson.

Of these belligerent scenes, the best actually is one of the few where the camera remains fixed. When Sadie learns that the missionary has approached the governor to have her deported back to the States, she venomously and assiduously declares, I know your kind. I bet when you were a kid you caught flies and tore their wings off. I bet you stuck pins in frogs just to see them wriggle and flap while you read them a lecture.

The supporting cast are excellent, from reliable character actor, Guy Kibbee, as amenable Joe, who desperately tempts to shield Sadie from the reformers, empathizing with her past, stating, We’ve all crossed thresholds we don’t brag about.

Portraying his ally and philosophical medical practitioner is Matt Moore, one of three Irish sibling actors, making one of his most notable contributions out of his 221 movie appearances. Particularly loathsome in just her second role of note is Beulah Bondi, later to play Jimmy Stewart’s mother to some of his most enigmatic roles, as the judgemental Mrs Davidson.

As for the role of bewitched Sergeant O’Hara, the performance of William Gargan is solid without leaving a lasting impression, and it is the backstory behind how he landed the role which offers more interest. Milestone had originally cast recently released felon and former actor, Paul Kelly, but United Artists had balked at any hint of controversy this may have arisen.

Ironically, in relation to the feature’s story-line of O’Hara dueling for the soul of Sadie, Kelly had been sentenced for manslaughter of fellow actor, Ray Raymond, in a drunken brawl over allegations that the latter’s wife was in an adulterous relationship with him.

As for Walter Huston, he is magisterial as the sermonizing, self-righteous, and dictatorial Mr Davidson. Both he and Crawford give of their best in their frequent exchanges where surface attempts at reaching any hint of common understanding suddenly sink away into the depths of open conflict between the unforgiving and the unrepentant.

Over the years, much criticism has been leveled at the obscure ending of this feature. Yet, this uncertainty lends to the film’s allure. First, in terms of plot development, we have broken, worn-down Sadie, whose conversion is visually apparent in her attire of simple plain dress and pared-down makeover, now consigned to face her penal punishment back in San Francisco as repentance for her past.

Then, her apparent determination to do so, so enraptures our proselytizing preacher, he now declares her radiant. As he now faces his inner lustful demons, Milestone brilliantly has Davidson beat in tune to the sensual native drums before retreating into the shadows. Consequently, the audience are left to surmise this monster’s rape of his unsuspecting convert, in turn leads to his suicide at betraying his religious principles.

However, the storm now broken, the audience are also presented with the almost taunting jazz playing from Thompson’s previously silenced phonograph and her re-emergence as sultry Sadie. Could this signal that the abhorrent discovery that all men are Pigs!, has unleashed a darker side to her character, suggestive that the unbridled threats she had previously made to Davidson have come to homicidal fruition? It is left for us to decide.

Bonus Features:
Commentary track by Mick LaSalle Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and noted film historian
Commentary track by Richard Barrios Writer, Historian, and Commentator
Liner notes reprinted from Views & Reviews Magazine by Jon Tuska, author and film historian
Alternate Opening Title and Credits Sequence from the 18-minute shorter 1938 Atlantic Reissue
Original Theatrical Trailer
Poster & Photo Gallery
Period appropriate Betty Boop Cartoon and Newsreel

Rain (1932) - Official HD Promo