When it "Rains" it Bores...

Okay, well, perhaps that isn't so since the rain in this film leads to the least boring part, but I couldn't resist that headline. The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) is a beautifully-appointed, widescreen, color remake of the 1939 film The Rains Came. Unfortunately, several lovely and even captivating ingredients don't exactly add up to a riveting final product and it's generally considered inferior to the earlier black and white version. Still, we do love our Lana Turner and have a fondness for several things which are to be found here: chiffon, cranky old ladies and disaster!

Ranchipur, a fictional Indian province, sprang from the pen of author and ecology enthusiast Louis Bromfield, who wrote The Rains Came in 1937. Bromfield was part of New York society and it was his house at which Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married. (He was Best Man.) The studio (20th Century Fox) wanted to use real locations in India, but were denied a permit, so a variety of locations in Pakistan filled in as establishing shots and with some sequences involving stand-ins.

Thus, when we first meet our leading lady, she's standing in the doorway of an ornate and expensive Eastern hotel, applying sunglasses to her famous face, as she heads to her car. (The stand-in was wearing them on location.) We can immediately see which Lana we're getting this time out; haughty, disaffected, detached Lana. No matter, I like her any way she comes.

That's all Lana's coordinated luggage atop the car!

She and her husband Michael Rennie board a train for Ranchipur, but with separate compart- ments. She is blithely reading a novel (presumably not The Rains Came!) when Rennie drops in with a trayful of accoutrements. It's clear that they are far from happy together as a couple, but he seems to want to rekindle their relationship...

...literally! He concocts a fiery beverage, a favorite of hers, and tries to reengage her in their marriage. She's not really having it, though. It seems she has all the money and wed him for his name. He's a Lord and now she's a Lady. And she calls the shots. He leaves, but not before lobbing a stinging insult her way. He tells her that he married her not just for her money, but because he knew he could never hurt her because she has no heart!

She's a bit happier when the train pulls into Ranchipur and she's greeted with scads of floral bouquets from a contingent of young girls. These girls, by the way, sing a positively excruciating song upon Rennie and Turner's arrival. It's so off-kilter it almost sounds like a joke!

Now inside the palace, they meet the Maharani, played by Eugenie Leontovich. This pint-sized pill plays for keeps. She asks Turner if she would like to play cards during her stay there, then informs her that she likes to win, even if it involves cheating. Turner responds that she, too, is used to winning. Best buds these two are not fated to be...

The following day, Rennie is looking over Leontovich's prized horses, with a stallion that's not for sale particularly on his agenda. Turner, bored of it all, barely disguises her ennui.

Things take a decided turn, though, when local dweller and friend of Leontovich's Fred MacMurray drops by. It seems he's an old pal of Turner's and she visibly brightens when he not only greets her, but plants a healthy kiss or two on her lips! And don't think that Leontovich has missed any of this. She's got Turner's number.

Cut to the local Christian mission where we find young Joan Caulfield. She's getting a shower, made possible by a chain of young Indian girls filling watering cans and passing them up to the one on top who's in charge of sprinkling the blonde lady down. Caulfield, whose mother lives at the mission, is invited to Leontovich's for a party honoring Rennie & Turner, but she's advised not to attend alone.

So she pulls herself together and heads over to MacMurray's house where she, in a slightly brazen move, invites him to escort her to the big night. MacMurray has a reputation as a rather ne'er do well drinker, but Caulfield doesn't seem to mind.

At the big reception, Rennie and Turner are chatting with Leontovich when suddenly Miss Lana sees something that strikes her fancy.

It's none other than Leontovich's adopted son, Richard Burton. He's an orphaned "untouch- able" who she and her late husband raised and sent to school in London. (He also had a scrape with student protesting and wound up in jail for a time!) Now a prestigious doctor, Turner all but salivates in his presence (and Leontovich is not missing the show...)

Opulence unseen in the old pan & scan rendition...

Burton takes Turner to a secluded, dimly-lit section of the palace and shows her some of his etchings the priceless artwork on the walls. One depicts a young man who deliberately lands his kite in a girl's yard as part of a traditional mating ritual.

Turner then, in a hilariously veiled bit of romantic suggestion, asks him if he is any good at flying his kite! Nothing really happens between them yet, but there is a bit of warmth brewing.

Later that evening, Leontovich puts her cards on the table, and not her bridge and poker ones! She makes it quite clear to Turner that she's on to her type of gal. Turner, in turn, makes it clear that she's not one to give in to any sort of pressure easily and barely cares what the older woman thinks.

Rennie wants to go tiger hunting, so Burton arranges an outing for them all. Since Turner is getting more and more dissatisfied with her husband and Burton is looking more and more appetizing to her, the camp is fraught with one sort of tension or another.

Burton's posture annoys me so much here...

When Turner excitedly storms off into the brush, she is confronted by a cobra, reared back and ready to strike! Powerless to do anything, she freezes until Burton can come to her rescue. With this, she's undone and falls into his arms crying.

Stubborn Rennie wants to bag a tiger so badly that he refuses to listen to Burton's instructions about the hunt and winds up getting mauled by a beast he incorrectly thought was dead! With that, the skies open up with lightning and rain. With Burton and Turner approaching love while Rennie is injured, the floodgates are being opened if you get my (and the movie's!) symbolism.

From Rennie's sickbed, he confronts Burton about what he rightly suspects is a burgeoning love affair between him and his wife. The noble Burton is unable to lie about it and even chides Rennie for having a low opinion of the woman he now loves, despite the fact that she's wed to someone else!

During a lull in the rain, the couple takes a walk in what is one of the movie's shoddiest scenes. The location crew filmed doubles walking along a magnificent pathway amid pools of water, but the stars back in Hollywood are walking on a treadmill in front of a rear-projection screen that doesn't match up in pace at all!

Soon the rains come again and the twosome takes shelter in a nearby building (and in one another's arms.)

Meanwhile, Caulfield has decided to deliberately ruin her pristine reputation by running away from the mission and spending the night on MacMurray's sofa, believing that the scandal will be enough for her mother to pack her back to the U.S. and school there, where she wants to be. MacMurray quickly realizes that if she stays, he isn't going to be able to leave her on the couch (!) and instead takes her back to the mission amid the pouring rain.

At the hospital where Burton works, he receives a visit from his adoptive mother Leontovich. She's zeroed in on the illicit love affair and wants him to abandon it. He is unable to do that. She declares that if he doesn't dump Miss Lana, she will banish the woman from Ranchipur to which he replies that he will then leave as well.

This is devastating to her since so many hopes for the province are hinged on his staying and helping to develop the place. (This is one of only a couple of scenes in which Burton's real hair is shown.)

Soon at one of the local parties, the guests are chatting and imbibing while bemoaning the fact that the rainy season in fully upon them with a vengeance. It's positively pouring outside.

The rains came!

Suddenly, Turner arrives, though, thanks to an order by Leontovich, she'd been dis-invited through a note she didn't yet take time to read. We see that Turner is a little unsteady on her feet, perhaps feeling under the weather.

She belligerently decides to stay at the party regardless of the host's wishes and heads out onto the covered porch for a drink and a visit with her lover Burton. She lets him know that she and his mother have had a very serious fight. (Man, I would like to have seen that rather than hear about it!)

Just by being at the party, even being in Ranchipur, she's in defiance of the maharani, making for a difficult situation between the two of them. Burton remains devoted to Turner and they engage in a passionate kiss. (More often, Burton is shown in this stone-faced, Wooden "Eastern" Indian sort of pose, which gets old quickly.) After MacMurray and Burton get into a heated exchange over Turner, things are about to come to blows, but are interrupted by an earth tremor.

Either an earthquake or they've each taken a good look at the script!

Burton has to go to the hospital and the police chief joins him, leaving a distraught Turner behind. She races out into the rain and suffers a total meltdown as MacMurray attempts to calm her and bring her back inside. (I found this sequence fascinating since Turner always strikes me as someone reluctant to get her hair wet.)

The host will not let MacMurray bring the collapsed Turner back inside, but he proceeds anyway. Even as another earthquake hits and a chandelier falls crashing to the floor, MacMurray plods upstairs with his charge even as the building is waffling!!

Now all hell is breaking loose in Ranchipur. Rain keeps pouring away as dilapidated buildings crumble apart.

Burton and his associate cannot get their car any further through the city, so they abandon it and climb over rubble to get to the hospital.

Meanwhile, the earth is being rendered open and hapless citizens are being swallowed up into the gaping fault lines. You know, it always seems like whenever this happens, certain direction-challenged victims careen directly into the crevasse instead of away from it! LOL

Ranchipur won its sole Oscar-nomination for Best Effects (losing to The Bridges at Toko-Ri), and they are generally good, but this particular moment is shaky - and not in a good way. It looks more like two pieces of film adjoined instead of one place with the ground ripping open.

Now it's about to get ugly because a dam high above the city is breaking apart!

Burton is crossing the bridge to the other side of town when a staggering deluge of water is unleashed and plummets towards the other people and him.

By now carrying a small girl, he, the girl and the police chief are washed over the side of the bridge and sent sprawling into the swirling, out-of-control river below!

He survives this (even if some of his Indian makeup doesn't) and manages to get the child to shore safely.

The citizens of Ranchipur aren't so lucky, though. The streets are awash with millions of gallons of raging water, knocking apart practically anything in its path.

Before the flood is over, the entire "untouch- ables" section of town is destroyed and many others are dead, injured or seriously ill.

MacMurray tries to nurse the highly-weakened Turner back to her robust self. All she cares about is Burton and where he is, as she tosses and turns.

One of movie's more preposterous moments comes when we're confronted with Caulfield in this tiny boat. Supposedly, she had set out after the second earthquake and had been paddling away in it all night, overnight, to get to MacMurray. This film asks us to believe that he puts the weary, sickened Turner in the boat with him and takes her to the mission, then got back in, paddled back and picked up Caulfield at his place to take HER back to the mission!! Thankfully, none of this is shown. I can't even picture MacMurray IN the boat (which makes The Ty-D-Bol Man's look roomy), much less with passengers...

"Hey, need a lift?!"

Anyway, back at the mission, Turner's fever is grave and she's hysterical. She insists that someone find Burton and tell her where she is and how ill she's gotten. The messenger clearly doesn't know the current score, though, because he tells Rennie about Turner, not Burton! So it falls to Rennie to relay the information personally.

In typical Turner fashion, while barely recovering from her dastardly illness, she first thinks of her appearance and how her hair is less than lustrous!

Two earthquakes and a flood have hit. Illness is abundant. Thousands have died. Yet, Turner is holed up in the private quarters of the mission and when asked by a subservient Caulfield if there is anything she can get her, Turner replies, almost jokingly, "shampoo, a facial and a manicure." !!! I mean, in the first film, The Rains Came, a rather selfish Myrna Loy found redemption by volunteering in a cholera hospital and, in an unforgettable moment, accidentally drinks from an infected pitcher of water. Here, we're expected to appreciate the shallow, selfish Lana who's barely sacrificed anything!

This pricey movie did not make back its cost at the box office. For years it was shown on television in a faded, blurry, pan & scan print that seemed to scream out its tackiness. However, seen now in widescreen opulence, with all its gloss and color intact, it's like watching a different film. That still doesn't make it particularly great, but it's still watchable and, at times, arresting.

It suffers most when compared to the original, which boasted Tyrone Power & Myrna Loy with George Brent (in MacMurray's part), doddering Nigel Bruce in Rennie's role and the commanding Maria Ouspenskya as the maharani. Made in that glory year of 1939, it not only took home the Best Effects Oscar, but enjoyed four other nominations and box office success. Ironically, Turner had at the time been considered for the Caulfield role, which was ultimately enacted by Brenda Joyce.

As Turner reported to work on Ranchipur, she'd been experiencing a bit of a career low point since 1952's The Bad and the Beautiful. Still busy, she was nonetheless involved in middling films like Flame and the Flesh (1954), Betrayed (1954) and The Prodigal (1955.) Diane was filmed before  Ranchipur, but released after in 1956. All did little to fix things, but her casting against type in 1957's Peyton Place led to her one and only Oscar nomination and by 1959's Imitation of Life she was riding high again. One sign that things in the movie biz were changing is that she uses the word "damn" once in this picture. Fifteen years prior, David O. Selznick had to pay a fine for its single use in Gone with the Wind and precious few producers were willing to go that route thereafter.

An acquired taste as an actress, I have to confess that I often enjoy her, especially in overheated melodramas (and almost never in frothy comedies.) At the time wed to former Tarzan Lex Barker (he's shown visiting the set, seated far left), she'd just nearly drowned and suffered an at-home accident prior to filming (and afterwards became pregnant with a baby stillborn at seven months, accounting for the gap in her career prior to Peyton.) This was not the only movie of Turner's with disaster elements. She survived one dilly of an earthquake in 1947's Green Dolphin Street.

She found acting opposite Burton an ordeal, thinking him overly confident, stubborn and not invested in his performance. Despite her published aversion to him, she nonetheless was his alleged lover at some point during the production as he reportedly slept with each of his leading ladies in films prior to 1957 when Joan Collins told him he could forget it during Sea Wife (1957.) A near constant smoker for most of her life, Turner died of throat cancer in 1995 at age seventy-four.

Burton had made his mark on stage and a few movies before scoring a huge success with The Robe (1953.) Some of the movies he made after this include Alexander the Great (1956) and Ice Palace (1960), but it was his presence, on-screen and off, in Cleopatra (1963) that really shot him into the public eye and led to him and eventual wife Elizabeth Taylor ruling the entertainment media for a decade with their squalor and splendor. A seven time Oscar nominee, he was never granted the award. A lifelong heavy drinker, he passed away in 1984 of a cerebral hemorrhage at only age fifty-eight (admittedly looking sixty-eight!)

MacMurray had been acting in movies since the late-20s, with some of them enduring classics like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Egg and I (1947.) Not long after Ranchipur, he began to make occasional TV appearances and in 1960 took on his iconic role as the father of My Three Sons, a long-running family sitcom. He hardly worked at all after that, nor had to, with The Swarm (1978) his final film. MacMurray passed away in 1991 at age eighty-three of leukemia and its complications.

By the time of this film, Caulfield was thirty-three yet playing a college-age girl! She had already enjoyed stage success in the early-1940s before coming to Hollywood in 1944. (J.D. Salinger allegedly saw her on stage and named his famous Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield after her.) Appreciated by cameramen for her face that was "impossible to photograph badly," her acting career remained limited, though reasonably steady. She eventually made good on business ventures including an automated floor polishing company before passing away in 1991 of lung cancer at age sixty-nine.

Rennie made his mark in British films of the 1930s and '40s before relocating to Hollywood. One of his most famous roles came with the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and he also appeared in The Robe (1953) with Burton. Well-liked by the movie community, he nevertheless had difficulty sustaining a career as a leading man, more often appearing in support.  Another lifelong heavy smoker, his health began to deteriorate until he died of emphysema in 1971 at age sixty-one.

Dig that necklace!

Leontovich was an accomp- lished stage actress who eventually became a respected teacher. Not only did she originate the ballerina role later played by Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932), but she also was the first to portray the Dowager Empress in Anastasia, later played on film by Helen Hayes in 1956. Film work was more sparse with only a few parts prior to this one and only one more after, though it was memorable. She played the mute invalid in the scream-fest Homicidal (1961.) Madame Leontovich lived to be ninety-three when pneumonia and cardiac arrest claimed her in 1993.

We'll end with a variety of promotional materials and foreign posters:

Somehow the dancer at the palace reception got the most prominent artwork for this Spanish poster!

Interesting artwork for this French poster, though it bears little resemblance to what occurs in the movie (Rennie and MacMurray are never out in the cataclysm this way.)

This Italian poster hysterically edits the campsite tableau to where it looks like the lovers are seated at a cafe with a window!

My, aren't they sunny in this Argentine one?!

This Spanish one made me smile because it has each of the principle performers housed with a raindrop! ("Hey! I was promised fourth dropping and you have me in fifth!")

This German program darkens Burton's eyes, something that didn't occur in the movie. At this point in Hollywood, most non-white characters, especially those involved in a love affair with another white character, were played by Caucasians in dark makeup (or more, if it was an Asian Native American role!) This, of course, would never fly today.

This one seems to go even further in trying to transform Burton into an East Indian. Even with two Caucasians, the idea of mixed romance was considered "daring" but the use of same-race performers kept it more of a "safe" fantasy.

This photo shoot was done in preparation for the U.S. poster (at the top of this post.) No scene in the actual movie is ever this sultry or suggestive.

Charles LeMaire coordinated the costumes, which were designed by Travilla. However, all of Lana's things were handled by Helen Rose, with whom she'd worked six times at MGM. A final collaboration took place in 1961 when Turner returned to MGM for Bachelor in Paradise.

And that's a wrap!