Who'll Stop the Rain

Converse, a war correspondent in Vietnam, decides the only way to come out of the war ahead is to smuggle heroin. He hires Hicks, a merchant sailor he knows, to carry it to America. In San Francisco nobody honours the arrangement, and Hicks has to run with the man's wife. Karel Reisz does not shape it as a chase. The idea of Vietnam being carried home is not a metaphor here but a substance: the war enters the country by the kilo and corrupts everyone it touches. Its sharpest perception is that people who were never near the fighting start talking with the same violence. The source is Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers, and the author worked on the screenplay. Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty star. It screened at Cannes in 1978. Its flaw is a slack middle section and a few character decisions that are not adequately prepared. Who it is for: viewers who like the bleak American films of the 1970s. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a hopeful close.