From The Deer Hunter and Rolling Thunder’s hook handed vengeance, to Taxi Driver’s powder keg madness and Deathdream’s walking dead, the ‘70s were rife with films of Vietnam veterans returning home as changed men. Based on Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers, Who’ll Stop the Rain (yes, like the Creedence Clearwater Revival song) is another late decade addition to that illustrious category. Equally gritty and humorous, crime thriller vicious and war commentary charged, Karel Reisz’s film of soldiers, drugs and a new America era is an intense time capsule still gripping today.
World-weary war correspondent John Converse (Michael Moriarty) and merchant marine Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte) form a partnership to complete a lucrative drug deal, smuggling heroin from Saigon to the states. Back home, Hicks finds that the intermediary is none other than Converse’s wife Marge (Tuesday Weld) and that an opportunistic third party wants the drugs and the money for themselves. Soon Hicks and Marge are on the run, pursued by sadistic crooks and a corrupt DEA agent through a cross-section of ‘70s Americana.
A neo-noir chase film immersed in Vietnam-era discontent, Who’ll Stop the Rain makes a strong impression with a first act fraught with enigmatic set-up spiraling into a flurry of hectic pursuits, grueling beatings, and Dilaudid withdrawal pains. Hicks’ odyssey becomes one through a microcosm of the era, a disillusioned soldier sprinting from the detached suburbs of San Francisco to the seedy backstabbing luxury of Los Angeles in an attempt to sell the heroin to Hollywood suits and finally to an abandoned hippie compound deep in the New Mexican wilderness.
For a film boasting such a propulsive first act and wartime noir-ish intrigue, the middle act becomes something of a sluggish cycle between narrative wheel-spinning, subplot dead-ends and odd humorous beats. Once Reisz takes Who’ll Stop the Rain into the wilds of New Mexico, suddenly this becomes an interesting ticking clock and possibly a template for the decade of soldier-back-home survival thrills that would explode in popularity with First Blood four years later. The way Nolte brings the war to the homeland, complete with a desire to “win” against criminal invaders, sure feels like proto-Rambo thrills with the action to match. Armed with a high-powered weapon cache, Hicks wages guerrilla war upon the crooks and corrupt forces closing in on him and Marge, in a well-staged escalating standoff of furious gunplay and tactical one-man-army cleverness.
Nolte is the lynchpin that holds Who’ll Stop the Rain’s disparate acts and uneven pacing together. The actor brings a hard-boiled steeliness to his self-destructive protagonist. Despite all the violence that breaks out, this is ultimately a character study of a man unable to escape the war and Nolte plays the role with a sweaty roiling intensity that elevates the film above that flabby middle and muddled plotting.
Mixing anti-war commentary, war-comes-home action and neo-noir nihilism, Who’ll Stop the Rain remains an interesting lesser-known addition to the decade’s Vietnam and crime cinema. The ‘70s was full of both types of films, but not many can boast such a blend of the two. Come for the gritty heroin-fueled pursuit and one thrilling extended gunfight; stay for a fierce Nolte setting the stage for an entire decade of Rambo.
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