The loathsome Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston) is evil incarnate, but presents himself as the only good person in the world, who must tell everyone else what to do and how to do it. The fact that many people ignore him just bolsters his belief that the world is Evil, and he alone is Good. (His wife (Beulah Bondi), a screeching harpy who obediently venerates him, doesn't count as another good person because she's a mere woman.) When Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) tells Davidson to his face what a hypocrite he is, he suffers what he considers an unbearable insult: a "party girl" dared to confront him with the truth about himself! He is then on an obsessive crusade to "save" her, by which he means humiliating her, demeaning her, and forcing her to complete obedience to his will. In one scene, as Sadie tries to stand up for herself, Davidson begins chanting the Lord's Prayer over and over, drowning her out, until she finally succumbs to his brainwashing and sinks to her knees in a chilling demonstration of how religion can be used as a club to bash "sinners" over the head.Davidson even convinces Sadie that she must "atone" for her sins by returning to the U.S. and turning herself in for a crime she was framed for. Ironically, what really saves Sadie is Davidson's inevitable surrender to his own evil.

Despite it's age and accompanying stagey direction this is still a very powerful film. The story works on various levels and having now seen this adaption I want to read the book for any nuances not transferred to the film.Yet, however good the story, it is Joan Crawford's performance that makes the screen version so watchable. She attracts and enthrals from the beginning (the snappy dialogue assists with this). She plays Sadie Thompson as flirty, sexy, sassy but also weak and vulnerable and does so in all the right places, at the right time, and in the right proportions. Walter Huston is also a large presence in the film and although these two main performances cast a large shadow which the lesser players struggle to find any light in which to illuminate their own character depictions it is still a very good film and outstanding for it's time.

I would like to echo the sentiments of others who are praising the virtues of this 1932 version. It was a rare loan out for Joan Crawford during her MGM years. The production has a few creaky moments, betraying stage origins. But Crawford is really great, and so is the rest of the cast. I love the way director Lewis Milestone includes those poetic shots of the landscape. This is easily in my top five favorite pre-code films. It's one of those pictures that I go back to often that seems to bring even deeper pleasure. The main thing the later Rita Hayworth version has over this one is Technicolor, but color is not necessary to tell this story.

RAIN is the second film version of a play that made a superstar of Jeanne Eagels on the Broadway stage; the first was a silent titled SADIE THOMPSON and starring Gloria Swanson, which was a success both critically and commercially. This second version, the first sound film based on the play, used the original title and starred Joan Crawford, who was already a major star but desired to stretch herself as an actress. Unfortunately for Crawford, neither the critics nor the public liked her as the unglamorous prostitute Sadie Thompson; that plus the fact that the play had begun to date rather badly made this film a resounding flop and Crawford took most of the heat for its failure.A second look, keeping the play's historical context in mind, leads me to the opposite conclusion. Crawford, who came to Hollywood knowing nothing about acting and who learned "on the job," as it were, never reached the heights of Davis, Hepburn, and Stanwyck, perhaps, but she was an apt pupil and she learned her craft well. A look at this extremely dated film today reveals that Crawford's performance is really the best thing about it.The plot is a moldy bit of melodrama involving a fanatical missionary (played here by Walter Huston) who, stranded in Samoa during a cholera outbreak, encounters prostitute Sadie Thompson and sets out to convert her, which for her involves returning to the States to serve a prison sentence even though she was framed. Mesmerized by the missionary's personality, Sadie is at first converted, then later disillusioned.The film is not terribly well made (interestingly there is no director credit, though IMDb lists Lewis Milestone); even for 1932 it is grainy and the camera-work jerky in spots. The decision to make the constant soaking rain a character in the drama is a plus: it adds to the atmosphere and makes for a perfect background for Sadie's emotional and spiritual journey.The acting is a mixed bag. Crawford is much, much better than one would expect since this film nearly wrecked her career at the time it was released. In fact it she might not have recovered had she not made GRAND HOTEL, one of her major triumphs, that same year. But whatever the film's weaknesses may be, Crawford is not among them. In fact her Sadie is a completely believable character; Crawford is utterly convincing as the unrepentant whore, then the "born again" woman redeemed, as she thinks, by the missionary, and in her "fall from grace;" in fact she's quite good, particularly considering that this is perhaps the most complex role she had attempted up to that time.The rest of the cast is mostly solid, familiar (at the time anyway) character actors, and they pretty much all acquit themselves well. Oddly, the weak link in the cast happens to be the one great actor in the whole thing: Walter Huston as the missionary Davidson. A legendary actor both on stage and screen, Huston plays the missionary like a hero out of an old stage melodrama, declaiming his lines in a way that was out of style even back in the 1920s when the play opened on Broadway. I don't know whether Milestone directed him to read his part this way or whether he simply did his own thing and ignored the director (so far as I know that was not his reputation), but either way it is a terrible choice; his performance is so hammy that it renders every scene in which he appears laughable, and when he and Crawford are on screen together, it is her realistic approach to her character that one finds believable; he is incredible to the point of being ridiculous.All in all, however, I found myself rather surprised that this film was such a failure in 1932. Huston's acting would have seemed less garish at the time, and I think the critics were terribly unfair to Crawford; even if they found her attempt to stretch her abilities less than successful (a view with which I do not agree), surely she deserved the credit for trying. Simply taking on the role was an act of courage on Crawford's part; Jeanne Eagels was inextricably linked to the role in the minds of many, and when you add to that the successful silent version starring Swanson, who was one of the biggest stars of her day, it took a LOT of nerve on Crawford's part to attempt what was at the time the biggest challenge she had ever faced. And I think she did a creditable job.