The Rains Came **** (1939, Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power, George Brent, Brenda Joyce, Nigel Bruce, Maria Ouspenskaya, Henry Travers) – Classic Movie Review 5,202

The 1939 romantic adventure film The Rains Came stars Tyrone Power as an Indian nobleman, trained as a doctor in America, who returns to India, where he dallies with English married woman (Myrna Loy). It won the first Best Special Effects Oscar.

Director Clarence Brown’s 1939 romantic adventure drama movie The Rains Came stars Tyrone Power as a handsome Indian nobleman Major Rama Safti, trained as a doctor in America, who returns to India to practise in the princely state of Ranchipur. There he is deflected from the true and honourable path of a gentleman by dallying with adventurous English married woman Lady Edwina Esketh (Myrna Loy) – that is until the rains come and duty calls.

Myrna Loy is top billed as Lady Edwina, and the story centres on the character’s redemption. Lady Edwina, who was the former lover of dissolute Tom Ransome (George Brent), and has married the elderly Lord Esketh, sets out to seduce, then gradually falls for Major Rama Safti, who represents the new India.

The Rains Came is quality vintage soap opera with acting, script (Philip Dunne and Julien Josephson) and Oscar-winning Best Special Effects (the first winner in this category) well up to snuff, plus the budget and imagination big enough to encompass flood, quake and plague. Thank you 20th Century Fox and its technical staff.

But it is time to sympathise yet again with George Brent, saddled with a rotten part as Loy’s drunken former lover, Tom Ransome, though he does get third billing. Nigel Bruce, cast against type. has thankless task of jollying up the role of Loy’s husband, Lord Albert Esketh. Nevertheless, Brent and Bruce are very good in their roles. Brenda Joyce makes an impressive movie debut as missionary’s daughter Fern Simon. And Maria Ouspenskaya and H B Warner are notable as the Maharani and Maharajah, the rulers of Ranchipur, with Ouspenskaya especially memorable.

Also in the first-rate cast are Brenda Joyce, Joseph Schildkraut, Henry Travers, Laura Hope Crews, Mary Nash, Jane Darwell, Marjorie Rambeau, William Royle, Harry Hayden, Abner Biberman, C Montague Shaw, Herbert Evans, Mara Alexander, William Edmunds, George Regas, Sam Harris, Fern Emmett, Leyland Hodgson, Frank Lacteen, Connie Leon, Rita Page and Pedro Regas.

It is shot in Black-and-White by Arthur C Miller, although original prints were tinted sepia.

It runs 105 minutes.

It was released on September 7, 1939.

It was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Best Special Effects for the earthquake and flood sequences. The Oscar went to Fred Sersen (photographic) and Edmund H Hansen (sound). This was the year of Gone with the Wind, which swept the board the Oscars, as well as The Wizard of Oz. so Sersen and Hansen’s victory was a triumph, remembering Gone with the Wind‘s effects, especially the burning of Atlanta, and those in The Wizard of Oz.

Incidentally, though Wings was presented with a plaque for Best Engineering Effects at the inaugural dinner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1929, no film was officially recognised for its special effects by the Academy until 1938, when a Special Achievement Award for Special Effects was given to Spawn of the North. Best Special Effects first became an actual category the following year, won by The Rains Came, with The Thief of Bagdad winning in 1940.

There were five other nominations – for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Arthur C Miller), Best Art Direction (William S Darling, George Dudley), Best Sound, Recording (Edmund H Hansen), Best Film Editing (Barbara McLean) and Best Original Score (Alfred Newman).

The screenplay is based on American bestselling writer Louis Bromfield’s novel, published in June 1937 by Harper & Brothers. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927 for Early Autumn. He enjoyed an equally brilliant second career. He became a farmer in the late 1930s and an early proponent of sustainable and organic agriculture in the US. He founded the experimental Malabar Farm near Mansfield, Ohio, and played an important role in the early environmental movement.

The Rains Came is so much better than its remake The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), with Richard Burton, Lana Turner and Fred MacMurray in the roles played by Power, Loy and Brent. The 1939 film faithfully uses the novel’s ending but the 1955 film changes it.

The cast are Myrna Loy as Lady Edwina Esketh, Tyrone Power as Major Rama Safti, George Brent as Tom Ransome, Brenda Joyce as Fern Simon, Nigel Bruce as Lord Albert Esketh, Maria Ouspenskaya as Maharani, Joseph Schildkraut as Mr Bannerjee, Mary Nash as Miss MacDaid, Jane Darwell as Aunt Phoebe/ Mrs Smiley, Marjorie Rambeau as Mrs. Simon, Henry Travers as the Rev Homer Smiley, H B Warner as Maharajah, Laura Hope Crews as Lily Hoggett-Egburry, William Royle as Raschid Ali Khan, C Montague Shaw as General Keith, Harry Hayden as the Rev Elmer Smiley, Herbert Evans as Bates, Abner Biberman, Mara Alexander, William Edmunds, George Regas, Sam Harris, Fern Emmett, Leyland Hodgson, Frank Lacteen, Connie Leon, Rita Page, and Pedro Regas.

Laura Hope Crews played Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind.

Brenda Joyce (born Betty Graftina Leabo, February 25, 1917 – July 4, 2009).

In 1939 20th Century Fox signed on Betty Graffina Leabo and changed her name to Brenda Joyce after silent star Alice Joyce and gave her this impressive movie debut here as Fern Simon. She went on to play Jane in Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), but left after her fifth Ape Man movie, Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949), and a 10-year reign, and quit movies for ever. She recalled: ‘I was never enamoured of Hollywood and films. The only good friend I had at 20th Century Fox was Gene Tierney.’

She also plays Jane in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, Tarzan and the Huntress and Tarzan and the Mermaids, and stars in The Spider Woman Strikes Back.

Brenda Joyce died of pneumonia on July 4, 2009, aged 92.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5,202

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