Who'll Stop the Rain (1978) on Netflix
In wartime Saigon, John Converse, a disillusioned war correspondent, asks Ray Hicks, a merchant marine sailor, to carry heroin to San Francisco. Converse's wife, Marge, is to pay for it.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.6/103,899 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes79%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Converse, a disillusioned war correspondent in Saigon near the end of the Vietnam War, asks Ray Hicks, a merchant marine sailor he knows from the United States, to help him smuggle a large quantity of heroin out of Vietnam to San Francisco. His wife, Marge, has developed a dependence on Dilaudid, and Converse plans to trade the drugs for payment from her. Hicks agrees to carry the heroin for him. The film adapts the novel Dog Soldiers, published in 1974 and a National Book Award winner for fiction in 1975, and the Saigon scenes were shot on a set in Mexico.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Who'll Stop the Rain (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For its original US theatrical release, the film was re-titled Who'll Stop the Rain after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, which features prominently on the soundtrack along with several other CCR tracks.
- Novelist Robert Stone based the character of Ray Hicks on Beat writer Neal Cassady, whom he got to know through novelist Ken Kesey, a graduate school classmate of Stone's at Stanford University.
SPOILER
Ray Hicks' death scene on the railroad tracks at the film's conclusion is based directly on Neal Cassady's death along a railroad track outside San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1968.- The hippie commune setting, where lights and stereo speakers rigged through the woods figure in Hicks' escape plan, is partly based on Ken Kesey's home in La Honda, California, where Kesey and the Merry Pranksters wired the surrounding woods with lights and sound to enhance their LSD experiments.
- Rather than filming in Southeast Asia, the production shot the film's Saigon scenes on a set in Mexico.
