Other Titles • Who'll Stop the Rain • Dog Soldiers (1978) • Dreckige Hunde (1978)
Synopses for Who'll Stop the Rain (1978)
1.
Following the success of The Deep, in which he costarred with Jacqueline Bisset's wet T-shirt, Nick Nolte gummed up the star-maker machinery by recasting himself from sex symbol to commanding character actor with this unrelentingly bleak, fatalistic post-Vietnam thriller based on Robert Stone's book Dog Soldiers. Nolte gives a ferocious performance as Ray Hicks, a Nietzche-reading merchant marine who reluctantly agrees to carry into the United States two keys of heroin for his friend, John Converse (a superb Michael Moriarty), a disillusioned journalist. Ray and John are "way out of their league," as a corrupt narcotics agent (Anthony Zerbe) sends two goons (the late, great Ray Sharkey, and Richard Masur, cast against type as a scuzzy psychopath) to hijack the heroin. Ray is forced to go on the run with John's anguished, pill-popping wife (Tuesday Weld in one of her best performances). A buried treasure, this is the kind of intense and uncompromising film that Nolte appeared in later in his notoriously roller-coaster career. --Donald Liebenson
(15 votes)
2.
In Karel Reisz's film, based on Robert Stone's novel DOG SOLDIERS, John Converse (Michael Moriarty), a Marine combat veteran, returns to Vietnam as a war correspondent. He is overwhelmed by the challenges that face him, and so he decides that in an insane world, it makes sense to to smuggle heroin into the United States, and joins in with a conspiracy group suspected to have CIA connections. His ex-marine buddy, Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), now a merchant marine sailor, helps him smuggle the heroin to San Francisco. When Ray delivers the drugs to John's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld), thugs disguised as Federal agents steal the drugs. Outraged at being double crossed, Hicks takes Marge with him on the run, followed now by real CIA agents. In their flight through the drug underworld of L.A. and down into New Mexico, Hicks discovers that Marge is a junkie herself. Though she is physically weak, she nonetheless possesses an inner strength to match Hick's exterior strength. Nolte, in one of his first staring roles, is unequaled in his expression of intelligence and sensitivity, while being simultaneously tougher than nails.
Reisz keeps the action and characters in the forefront, and in doing so keeps this heavily allegorical story about the corrupting effect of the Vietnam War on America from collapsing under its own weight.
(15 votes)
3.
Two-time Oscar® nominee Nick Nolte is "like a champion achieving cinematic immortality [in this] knockout adventure destined to become a classic" (Washington Post). Co-starring Tuesday Weld (Falling Down) and Michael Moriarty (TV's "Law & Order"), this "savage, paranoid thriller" (Newsweek) is "acted brilliantly and cast perfectly [and] one of the year's best" (The New York Times)!
Fresh from the bloody battlefields of Vietnam, Ray Hicks (Nolte) does his friend Converse a favor, smuggling a stash of heroin back to the States. But when Ray goes to deliver the drugs, he and Converse's wife, Marge (Weld), are ambushed and barely escape with their lives! Suddenly on the run from two ruthless thugs and a murderous cop, the unlikely pair must find a way to get along and survive a perilous double-cross in this "gripping nightmare adventure" (New West) that quickly becomes a "harrowing journey into hell" (Newsweek).
(15 votes)
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