Who'll Stop the Rain | |
---|---|
Directed by | Karel Reisz |
Screenplay by | Judith Rascoe Robert Stone |
Based on | Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone |
Produced by | Herb Jaffe Gabriel Katzka |
Starring | Nick Nolte Tuesday Weld Michael Moriarty Anthony Zerbe |
Cinematography | Richard H. Kline |
Edited by | John Bloom |
Music by | Laurence Rosenthal |
Production company | Katzka-Jaffe |
Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date |
|
Running time | 126 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $5.5 million [1] |
Who'll Stop the Rain is a 1978 American crime war film [2] directed by Karel Reisz and starring Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, and Anthony Zerbe. It was released by United Artists and produced by Herb Jaffe and Gabriel Katzka with Sheldon Schrager and Roger Spottiswoode as executive producers. The screenplay was by Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone, based on Stone's novel Dog Soldiers (1974), the music score by Laurence Rosenthal, and the cinematography by Richard H. Kline. The movie was entered in the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. [3]
The film opens in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War.
John Converse, a disillusioned war correspondent, approaches Ray Hicks, a merchant marine sailor and acquaintance of Converse from the U.S., for help in smuggling a large quantity of heroin from Vietnam to San Francisco, where he will exchange the drugs for payment with Converse's wife Marge, who has become addicted to Dilaudid.
When Hicks gets back to the U.S. and discovers he is being followed by thugs connected either to Converse or his suppliers, he goes on the run with Marge and the heroin, and eventually they are pursued by corrupt DEA Agent Antheil, who initially set the deal in motion. As Marge is separated from her supply of Dilaudid, she experiences withdrawal, and Hicks decides to help wean her off her addiction by using the heroin. Hicks also attempts to find another buyer for the heroin before his pursuers can catch up to him.
The film is based on Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers (1974), which won the National Book Award (US) for fiction in 1975. [4] For its original US theatrical release it was re-titled Who'll Stop the Rain, after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, which features prominently (along with several other popular CCR tracks) on the film's soundtrack. The film was released as Dog Soldiers in several places. Some copies of the DVD of Who'll Stop the Rain contain prints titled Dog Soldiers.
Stone based the character of Ray Hicks on Beat writer Neal Cassady, with whom Stone became acquainted through novelist Ken Kesey, a graduate school classmate of Stone's at Stanford University. [5]
Hicks' death scene on the railroad tracks at the film's conclusion is directly based on Cassady's death along a railroad track outside of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1968.[ citation needed ] The hippie commune setting, where lights and stereo speakers placed throughout the woods are utilized in Hicks' escape plan, is partially based on Kesey's home in La Honda, California, where Kesey and his friends — known as the Merry Pranksters — famously wired the surrounding woods with lights and sound equipment to enhance their experiments with LSD. [6]
The Saigon scenes were filmed on a set in Mexico. There was a casting advertisement in Mexico City for people of any Asian background to represent the Vietnamese.[ citation needed ]
Creedence Clearwater Revival, commonly abbreviated as CCR or simply Creedence, was an American rock band formed in El Cerrito, California. The band consisted of lead vocalist, lead guitarist, and primary songwriter John Fogerty, his brother, rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook, and drummer Doug Clifford. These members had played together since 1959, first as the Blue Velvets and later as the Golliwogs, before settling on Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1967. The band's most prolific and successful period between 1969 and 1971 produced fourteen consecutive Top 10 singles and five consecutive Top 10 albums in the United States, two of which – Green River (1969) and Cosmo's Factory (1970) – topped the Billboard 200 chart. The band performed at the 1969 Woodstock festival in Upstate New York, and was the first major act signed to appear there.
John Cameron Fogerty is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. Together with Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and his brother Tom Fogerty, he founded the swamp rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), for which he was the lead singer, lead guitarist, and principal songwriter. CCR had nine top-10 singles and eight gold albums between 1968 and 1972, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker and film critic, one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in British cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the best-known films he directed are Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a classic of kitchen sink realism, and the romantic period drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).
The Merry Pranksters were followers of American author Ken Kesey. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement and presaged what are commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed and red, white, and blue clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and documents a 1966 trip on Furthur from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend the novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time.
Cosmo's Factory is the fifth studio album by the American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released by Fantasy Records on July 16, 1970. Six of the album's eleven tracks were released as singles in 1970, and all of them charted in the top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. The album spent nine consecutive weeks in the number one position on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified 4x platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1990. Rolling Stone ranked it number 413 on its 2020 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
Robert Anthony Stone was an American novelist, journalist, and college professor.
Woodstock is a 1970 American documentary film of the watershed counterculture Woodstock Festival which took place in August 1969 near Bethel, New York.
Raymond Sharkey Jr. was an American stage, film and television actor. His most notable film role was Vincent Vacarri in the 1980 film The Idolmaker, for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. He is also known for his role as Sonny Steelgrave in the television series Wiseguy.
Anthony Jared Zerbe is an American actor. His notable film roles include the post-apocalyptic cult leader Matthias in The Omega Man, a 1971 film adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, I Am Legend; as an Irish Catholic coal miner and one of the Molly Maguires in the 1970 film The Molly Maguires; as a corrupt gambler in Farewell, My Lovely; as the leper colony chief Toussaint in the 1973 historical drama prison film Papillon; as Abner Devereaux in Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park; as villain Milton Krest in the James Bond film Licence to Kill; Rosie in The Turning Point; Roger Stuart in The Dead Zone; Admiral Dougherty in Star Trek: Insurrection; and Councillor Hamann in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.
Dog Soldiers is a novel by Robert Stone, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1974. The story features American journalist John Converse, a Vietnam correspondent during the war, Merchant Marine sailor Ray Hicks, Converse's wife Marge, and their involvement in a heroin deal gone bad. It shared the 1975 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction with The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams. Dog Soldiers was named by Time magazine one of the 100 best English-language novels, 1923 to 2005.
Humppa-Akatemia is a 2000 compilation album by the Finnish group Eläkeläiset.
"Travelin' Band" is a song written by John Fogerty and originally recorded by Creedence Clearwater Revival. It was included on their 1970 album Cosmo's Factory. Backed with "Who'll Stop the Rain", it was one of three double sided singles from that album to reach the top five on the U.S. Pop Singles Chart and the first of two to reach the number 2 spot on the American charts, alongside "Lookin' Out My Back Door", in which they were unable to interrupt the six-week run of the successful number one, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and Garfunkel. "Travelin' Band" was also a hit in the UK, reaching number eight on the UK Singles Chart.
"Fortunate Son" is a song by the American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released on the band's fourth studio album, Willy and the Poor Boys in October 1969. It was previously released as a single, together with "Down on the Corner", in September 1969. It soon became a Vietnam anti-war movement anthem and an expressive symbol of the counterculture's opposition to U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War and solidarity with the soldiers fighting it. The song has been featured extensively in pop culture depictions of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement.
Dog Soldiers is a Cheyenne Indian military society, whose members were also referred to as "Dog Men".
"The Ties That Bind" is a song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen. It is the opening song on his fifth album, The River. It was the second song recorded for 'The River', at The Power Station in New York on April 9–11, 1979. The recording engineer was Bob Clearmountain. After Springsteen injured himself driving an ATV, forcing a one-month halt, Neil Dorfsman became the chief engineer when sessions resumed. Springsteen wrote the song during September - October 1978, while on the road during the Darkness Tour. After introducing it on November 1, 1978, it was played every night during the final two months of the tour.
"Who'll Stop the Rain" is a song written by John Fogerty and originally recorded by Creedence Clearwater Revival for their 1970 album Cosmo's Factory. Backed with "Travelin' Band", it was one of three double-sided singles from that album to reach the top five on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and the first of two to reach the No. 2 spot on the American charts, alongside "Lookin' Out My Back Door"/"Long As I Can See the Light". In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 188 on its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.
"Deja Vu (All Over Again)" is a song by American rock singer/songwriter John Fogerty. It is the title track, opening track and lead single to his 2004 album. The song reached #4 on the Billboard Adult Alternative chart.
Nassau Coliseum, New York 1980 is a live album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, released in March 2015, and was the fourth official release through the Bruce Springsteen Archives. The show was originally recorded live at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, on December 31, 1980.
At the Royal Albert Hall is a 2022 live album recorded in 1970 with American swamp rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The performance was released as an album to coincide with the documentary film Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, directed by Bob Smeaton. The recordings document the band's first European tour and feature footage that has never been released; the album includes the entire set recorded on April 14, 1970. An earlier live album, The Concert, released in 1980, was initially erroneously titled The Royal Albert Hall Concert, but actually documented a completely different CCR show in Oakland, California, three months before their UK tour.