A Hatful of Rain (1957)
Johnny's addicted to drugs and stays addicted to drugs.
Director Fred Zinnemann was on a run. His last four movies—High Noon, The Member of the Wedding, From Here to Eternity, and Oklahoma!—were critical and commercial successes. He was asking the hard questions about life, meaning, and duty while unabashedly portraying an optimistic view of America. What did he have planned next? Ah, a character study about drug addiction! Probably something about struggle and redemption, right? Something hopeful? Something better than The Man with the Golden Arm, at least?
Nope.
Johnny Pope (Don Murray), a Korean War hero who became addicted to morphine in an Army hospital, lives with his pregnant wife Celia (Eva Marie Saint) and his brother Polo (Anthony Franciosa). Johnny needs $20 for his next fix and $500 to pay off his drug dealer, Mother (Henry Silva). Mother gives Johnny a gun to use to get the money but Johnny sucks at crime, so he’s gotta beg his brother—the only other person who knows about his habit and the guy who’s sworn he’s not gonna help him anymore—for the money.
Meanwhile, Celia thinks Johnny is cheating on her1, and, because this is a movie, Polo is in love with Celia. This drives a bunch of the movie’s pointless melodrama, as does the relationship between the brothers and their father (Lloyd Nolan). Eventually Johnny comes clean to his wife about his addiction, and the good love of a wife helps him get…
Wait, what? The movie doesn’t end with him getting clean? It ends with Celia calling the police on Johnny?? That’s the end of the movie?!
Rating: 4/10—pat melodrama, druggie stereotypes, and a pervading sense of hopelessness.2
Cast and Crew
Johnny and his brother Polo were played by Don Murray and Anthony Franciosa, respectively. Franciosa reprised his role from the 1955 Broadway play, which he starred in alongside Shelley Winters.3 “A Hatful of Rain” was good to Franciosa: he received a Tony nomination for the play, an Oscar nomination for the movie,4 and Winters as a wife. Murray had his own breakout in a 1956 adaptation of the William Inge play Bus Stop, which he starred in with Marilyn Monroe.5 We won’t see Don Murray again, but we’ll be seeing Franciosa in our very next column.
Eva Marie Saint, in comparison to her noisy co-stars, actually gives a good performance. This is just her third film role, but when you start with On the Waterfront, you set the bar awfully high. Before her film career, she was a TV star6 on the kind of dramatic, non-serialized live shows that we don’t have anymore. You can watch her performance in a live TV adaptation of “Our Town” where she stars alongside Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman.
Bernard Herrmann, the legendary film composer, did the music for A Hatful of Rain. It’s a delightfully abrasive score, though initially it was so abrasive that he was asked to tone it down.7 Herrmann is more known for his work on Hitchcock films, though—he did eight of them, including Psycho (1960) and Vertigo (1958)—as well as for scoring Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
The Trivia
Some old-timey garments are mentioned in this film, so let’s talk a bit about them. First, Polo mentions a woman dreaming she did her laundry in her Maidenform bra. This refers to an ad campaign the New Jersey bra company Maidenform ran in the ‘50s and ‘60s:
Maidenform bras distinguished themselves by accentuating a woman’s form instead of flattening it. They’re now owned by Hanesbrands, which also has the lines Hanes, Bali, and Playtex.
As the drunken Polo is disrobed and helped to bed, he cautions Johnny and Celia to be careful with his Arrow shirt. Arrow was once known for their detachable collars (back in the day, your shirt and collar were separate8) and for their “Arrow Collar man” ad campaign. Arrow then began making shirts with collars attached to them (you know, the things we now call “collared shirts”) and they were extremely popular.
The movie name-drops pinochle and, for this section, I learned to play it. Let’s start with the weird: a pinochle deck is just nine through ace, but with two of each card.9 Play is in three phases. First, partnerships do iterative bidding on how many points they think they’ll take, and the team that bids highest names the trump suit.10 Then, each player reveals their melds, receiving points for runs (ace through ten in a suit), four-of-a-kinds, and the special situations listed below:
“Pinochle” – jack of diamonds and queen of spades (and also for “double pinochle,” which is both jacks of diamonds and both queens of spades)
“Dix”11 – nine of trumps
“Marriage” - the king and queen of a suit (worth more in the trump suit)
Then there’s the cardplay, which is trick-based and is similar to spades / cribbage / euchre.12 The scoring is different, though: instead of counting tricks, the individual cards won have specific values. In the variant I played, ace through jack were worth 10 and the last trick was worth 10, meaning each deal awarded 250 points (plus whatever was scored in melds).
Odds and Ends
Celia yells at Johnny, saying he “looks like Mickey Rooney leaving Boys Town forever,” referencing the 1938 film Boys Town about Father Flanagan’s home for underprivileged boys…Polo asks Johnny who he’s going to vote for for Miss Rheingold 1957; Rheingold Brewery ran that contest from 1940 to 1965 to see who would be in their commercials...Celia and Johnny live on Rivington Street, which is named for James Rivington, who likely supported the Culper spy ring that supplied George Washington with information.13
And don’t worry, we’re not done with movies about addiction—not by a long shot.
Which he sort of is, but it’s with drugs.
Though it makes drugs seem pretty great. Here’s Mother’s pitch: “Look what I got for you, Johnny. Right hand, pure white, a free ride on the midnight carousel, tax-free, and you'll fly like a bird.” Nice!
Remember her? We watched her get murdered for not being Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun.
Tellingly, though this film is ostensibly about Murray’s character’s struggle with drug use, it was Franciosa who scored the Oscar nomination.
Is William Inge Clifford Odets? Maybe.
She was considered the “Helen Hayes of Television”—Helen Hayes being the “First Lady of American Theater.” Helen Hayes was the second person to score an EGOT (after Richard Rodgers).
#ReleaseTheHerrmannCut
When you wear a shirt, your collar is the thing that gets dirty and wears out. Having a detachable collar means you can just wash that without washing the shirt itself, which extends the life of the shirt.
Meaning there’s two nine of diamonds, two nine of hearts, etc. In total, there are 48 cards in the deck and each player receives 12 each deal.
In some variants—including the one I played on Trickster—the players on the team that chooses the trump suit swap four cards with each other.
Pronounced “deece.” In concept, dix seems similar to nobs in cribbage. “Dix” is also “ten” in French, and ten is the number of points you get for it.
Except 10 is the second-highest card.
Not a correction, just an additional interesting fact: This movie was based on a play by M. V. Gazzo, who would much later receive a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for "The Godfather Part II."