Rain (1932)

This is one of several film versions of the W. Somerset Maugham story Miss Thompson. More specifically Rain is an adaptation of the 1923 play of the same name that was adapted from Maugham's story, and like many films of its time that come from plays this movie feels oddly stage bound (especially for a story set in the south seas) and very talkie. The story concerns the passengers of an ocean liner who are unexpectedly forced to stop and stay in American Samoa after something happens to their boat (the movies not real clear on what happened with the boat but I read on line that it might have been a cholera outbreak on board).

Among the passengers put ashore is the prostitute Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) who is fleeing legal troubles in the States, and the party of Alfred Davidson (Walter Houston) a "moral reformer" and missionary and Dr. Robert MacPhail (Matt Moore) and their wives. These characters all end up staying in the same lazily decaying hotel in Pago Pago, where Davidson becomes obsessed with either saving Miss Thompson, or ensuring that she gets severely punished for her life of sin. Dr. MacPhail tries to calm Davidson down and intercede for Miss Thompson, who was on her way to (I think) Tahiti to take up a legitimate job working for a friend. Davidson however will not budge and uses his political influence to force the governor of the island to agree to send Sadie back to the States where she expects to go to prison. The stress and trauma of this is enough to  cause Sadie to have a breakdown and become extremely pliable to Davidsons wishes. But by this time his reformers zeal has given way to baser desires, and things will not end well for him.

I'd have to agree with what the Motion Picture Herald said about this film:  "Because the producers have made such a strong attempt to establish the stern impressiveness of the story, it is rather slow. In its drive to become powerful, it appears to have lost the spark of spontaneity....Joan Crawford and Walter Huston are satisfactory." Crawford is playing a role kind of similar to Bettie Davis's in Of Human Bondage and Huston plays the kind of excessively moralizing role he was often expected to carry in films of this time such as Gabriel Over the Whitehouse and Dodsworth.  Everyone does what they can with this material, director Lewis Milestone even manages to work in a few interesting tracking or angled shots, and the seat design is appropriately moody (the constant rain effect even works for the most part). However I don't think that film is the right medium for this story, on the stage or the page this was likely more satisfying stuff. **1/2