Rachel, Rachel

source: Rachel, Rachel

This small, naturalistic film is one of the more honest films to come out of Hollywood. Its portrait of unexceptional lives strikes chords most movies never hear. Woodward and Harrington are superb, and under husband Paul Newman's direction, Woodward gives what is probably her finest performance. Newman has done a first rate job, and his use of photographed thought is particularly effective thanks in large part to Dede Allen's superb editing. The scene at the revival is ,perhaps, overdone but, the rest of the film feels true to life. The film's integrity is in its refusal to romanticize or provide dramatic climaxes. There are no heroes or villains, nothing remarkable happens, yet the film is holding and affecting and it should have been on the AFI's list of The 100 Greatest American Films. It deservedly received Oscar nods for best picture and actress, but director Newman was not nominated. Both the New York Film Critics and the Hollywood Foreign Press (Golden Globes) awarded Newman and Woodward. A gem!

I noticed that there are lots of very favorable reviews for "Rachel, Rache", but it really left me flat. Mostly it was because the film was done in a very stark manner--lacking music, energy and a real connection with the title character. Perhaps you'll feel different about .it...I just didn't care very much for the movie. This movie is unusual because Joanne Woodward's husband, Paul Newman, directed the film--and it was his first directorial job. Rachel is a 35 year-old lady who is desperately lonely. She lives with her mother and is the proverbial spinster school teacher. She wants more out of life and spends much of the film thinking of the past and daydreaming about her future. When she begins dating a man (James Olson), she falls VERY deeply in love and throws herself at him--but it's all too fast and too heavy. What is to become of poor Rachel? As I said above, the film really lacks energy. I realize this was deliberately done in order to heighten the blandness of her life, but it felt oppressive. In addition, the flashbacks seemed more of a distraction than anything else. Overall, an interesting idea for a movie but also a film that is not at all pleasant or enlightening---it's just flat and unappealing.

This is one of those so called ground breaking 60's dramas which uses the familiar device of a hopeless, frustrated spinster, (such as Jane Wyman would have played 10 or 15 years earlier, think "Miracle in the Rain") in an attempt to propagandize the audience into thinking the solution to her dilemma is sexual liberation. Thus we have plain jane school-teacher Woodward finding carnal knowledge with a former classmate who's on a brief return visit to her home town. Woodward sees sky rockets, marriage and children, and of course suffers the inevitable disillusionment of desertion. Exceedingly well acted by all concerned, with many precise observations of small town life, (including a brilliant evocation of an old ladies bridge club) , the film uses these strengths to cloak, (make respectable?) distasteful scenes of Woodward's ruination in the hay, along with a highly improbable Lesbianic interlude with Estelle Parsons. How interesting it would have been to have seen this theme treated the way Francois Mauriac would have realized it--and yet nowhere is the moral, much less, supernatural dimension even fleetingly evoked much less alluded to. Indeed the films' only reference to religion is a depiction of a revival meeting featuring a wild eyed snake handler. And so, in the end, (like so many other late sixties pretensions), all that we are left with here is mere, dreary, sociological naturalism, a melo but with the same basic ends as a Norman Lear comedy (all you squares need to unshackle all of your old wives tale repressions)--and not the lyrical star dust of Tennesse Williams who explored the same themes in "Summer and Smoke". Not the sort of role Loretta Young would have played!

Joan Woodward and the rest of the cast give wonderful performances, but this would-be character study is slow, ponderous, and obvious. Rachel is depressed and needs a new attitude. She rappels off a number of characters (a woman friend, a man friend, her mother) and at the end finally develops courage enough to start the second half of her life somewhere else. I thought this movie was a tedious downer when I saw it in a theater in 1968, and now with my wisdom and maturity of 40 years later, I still think it is more heat than light. As another reviewer here observed, Paul Newman had the clout to get it made, and vanity projects generally don't acquit themselves well. It was show-offy daring for its time, I think that's why it got so much buzz.

In pretty much every movie where I've seen Joanne Woodward, she does a great role, and "Rachel, Rachel" (directed by her husband Paul Newman) is no exception. Woodward plays Rachel Cameron, a schoolteacher in a conservative, repressive small town. Various incidents from her childhood have long haunted her, and she still lives with - and has to take care of - her needy mother. Without a doubt she's unfulfilled in life, but she basically has no way to escape this existence. But things just might change when childhood friend Nick (James Olson) returns to town after spending many years in the big city. By barely moving her face, Woodward conveys many emotions in this movie: anguish, cynicism, hope, and more. I would suspect that "Rachel, Rachel" probably played into the burgeoning feminist movement, but moreover it showed the complete break from "traditional" American mores (after all, what characterized the '60s more than that?). Nineteen sixty-eight was certainly a great year for movies: along with this one, there was "Planet of the Apes", "Romeo & Juliet", "2001", "The Odd Couple", "Bullitt", "Charly" and "Yellow Submarine". Definitely one that I recommend. Also starring Geraldine Fitzgerald.

For Paul Newman's directorial debut, a property was chosen that was a real star vehicle for his spouse Joanne Woodward. In a distinctly unglamorous part, Rachel Rachel is about a 30 something spinster schoolteacher who lives with her perpetually sick mother and yearns to have something more out of life. She's inexperienced in a whole lot of different ways. The script written by Stewart Stern which did receive an Oscar nomination uses the technique of Eugene O'Neill perfected on stage and screen in Strange Interlude. It's confined in this star vehicle to the lead character of Woodward. We get to hear her inner thoughts and see them acted out in her drab existence. Looming in front of her consciousness is her unseen sister who did leave the nest and got married and started a family of her own. Mother Kate Harrington always uses that example to berate Woodward. At the same time Woodward must not entertain thoughts of leaving mother. The two live above a funeral parlor that was once her father Donald Moffat's business, but now has been taken over by Frank Corsaro who lets them stay on the premises. Not exactly an atmosphere to encourage romance of any kind. After a night on the town with James Olson who quite frankly was just looking to make an easy score on a sex starved spinster, Woodward has to make a few life altering decisions. Rachel Rachel got 3 other Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress for Joanne Woodward and Best Supporting Actress for Estelle Parsons. Parsons has an interesting role herself as fellow teacher and confidante to Woodward. She's got herself wrapped in some fundamentalist church which serves as her vehicle for a social life. But that is far from Woodward's scene. Purportedly Woodward was miffed that husband Newman got no nomination for Best Director. But I think the one who really should have been miffed is Kate Harrington. A veteran of a couple TV soap operas this was clearly her big screen career role. And she's really the only one who matches Woodward in any scene they're in. She definitely should have gotten some Academy recognition. Rachel Rachel is a fine character study and a great vehicle for Joanne Woodward. And having it filmed in and around Paul and Joanne's Connecticut home must have been a blessing for both of them.

Paul Newman directed his wife Joanne Woodward in this adaptation of Margaret Laurence's book "A Jest of God", and does a pretty good job envisioning the plight of a small town spinster schoolteacher who is aching to break free from a life with no prospects. Newman's inherent good taste (the pastoral town, the neighborly feel) works against the need to show this woman's personal suffocation, and though we can see that romance might bring her happiness, the film is unsatisfactory in tying up this loose end in Rachel's life. Some keenly-shot flights-of-fancy are well-realized by Newman and his editor, although several sequences (such as a church meeting and Woodward's roll in the blankets with James Olson) are allowed to run on too long. Woodward is excellent, as is Estelle Parsons in a memorable turn as Rachel's friend (who is suffering herself, for far different reasons). **1/2 from ****

This is only the third time I've seen this film (2006), having first seen it when it came out in 1968 and again in 1975. At each of those times the movie reflected stages of transition in my own life, and that is what makes it so riveting, scarily so, even today almost 40 years after I first saw it. This movie, like Midnight Cowboy and others, effectively demonstrates how small-town repression and childhood experiences invariably seep into our adult lives and influence them in ways not always recognizable or to our benefit. Here is a repressed girl in a repressive small town (often New England is a symbol of suffocating, inbred, isolated, deep-level collective cultural phantoms.) doing her best to essentially stay that way, despite the well-intentioned but misdirected efforts of Calla (did Estelle Parsons play the cantankerous sister in "I Never Sang for my Father"?). That church scene would make me feel downright creepy in I were conned into attending it. The flashbacks to childhood, especially the dying boy and her own experience in the basket in the mortuary prep room, are chillingly effective in conveying the grip her youth's experiences still have on her. As for the picture the man shows Woodward, I thought it was his dead twin brother, or it could have been his son. But the phone call she later made indicated he had no family, so it's anyone's guess as who's picture it is. I still think it's the brother. And that may bring Rachel dangerously close to the hold that her childhood could still have on her. Finally, Rachel's decision to go to Oregon (a symbol of liberation from past miasmas, a "coming into one's own light a la the free-standing Kouros, a Jungian "individuation") makes this film very satisfying to watch. We're still left wondering--how much of her baggage does she take with her? But I left thinking that she was free enough to decide that consciously and independently.

This film is one my all time favorites. It's a strong story about a school teacher who lives with her cranky, dominating mother and who hasn't had (or used!) the chance to take responsibility for her own life. Rachel is a woman of many fears; fears that may seem insignificant and vain from an outsiders point of view but that are everything to her, that actually define the framework for her life. In a little town of conservative values it is hard to take a turn and find the courage to become something you weren't before. Joanne Woodward gives a masterful performance and is the heart and soul of this film. She does the most incredible things with just her eyes and her face, and her voice. She makes Rachel so real it hurts to watch. That's acting. Estelle Parsons as Calla is fantastic, too. This is a beautiful, sensitive movie, highly underrated and way too unknown to most people. For me, it's a classic. Go find it and see it!