The Rains Came: Clarence Brown

Clarence Brown's The Rains Came is one of the oddest classical Hollywood pictures I've seen. The reason is that it contains one of the most shockingly progressive and non-stereotypical depictions of India that I have seen in ANY Western film. While the film does feature actors in brown-face (this was the 1930s, after all) there are practically no grating, offensive Indian accents or moments where we are supposed to laugh and marvel at how backwards their culture is. All of the Indian characters are earnestly dead-set in trying to improve their country. Of course, this is still an India under the purview of British colonialism, but the native Indians are portrayed as being more concerned with modernizing their nation than any of the Europeans/Americans are. Yet despite all of this, The Rains Came staggers under one crucial flaw: it uses the death and suffering of countless Indians via earthquake and flood as a framing device for the melodramatic relationships of the Western characters. In truth, I wouldn't be too bothered by this (relatively speaking, I mean) if the film had been properly paced. But the first half drags mercilessly and the characters' emotions never reach the same scale as the carnage they encounter.

6/10