Everyday Wonders: ‘Miracle in the Rain’ (1956)

This post is part of the Second Van Johnson blogathon, hosted by Love Letters To Old Hollywood. See the other posts here.

“There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.”

-‘Anthem’, Leonard Cohen

In Miracle in the Rain, two strangers meet during a New York City downpour and fall in love. This is the first of the film’s miracles—one of those small, everyday marvels we take for granted.

Ruth Wood (Jane Wyman) has learned to expect little from life. When she was a girl her father walked out on his family, transforming his wife into a nervous recluse and his daughter into her mother’s permanent caretaker. Now a shy, unassuming woman, Ruth spends her days working in a non-descript office and her nights with her mother, with occasional detours to the cinema or the grocery store.

One afternoon in spring 1942, Ruth goes shopping then joins a crowd huddling under a canopy, waiting for the rain to stop. A soldier standing nearby prattles on about the weather, seemingly to no one in particular.  But as more people leave he moves closer and Ruth realises to her embarrassment that he’s been talking to her. His name is Arthur Hugenon (Van Johnson) and in short order he commandeers her packages for safekeeping under his rain coat, bustles her onto a bus, asks her and her mother out for dinner and, when she explains that Mrs. Wood can’t leave the house, invites himself over instead. He even takes Ruth to a deli and buys the entire meal.  Bewildered but charmed, Ruth lets him into her home and into her heart.

The film follows the next eight or nine days as Ruth and Art get to know each other. He takes her to a restaurant and a show; they spend Sunday in Central Park. They talk about their hopes and fears, about Ruth’s father and the pain he left behind, about the life they’ll build together once the war is over.

It’s easy to dismiss Miracle in the Rain as a saccharine melodrama, sentimental mush from the otherwise caustic pen of Ben Hecht (adapting his own 1943 novel). Yet sentiment is entirely the point. Ruth wasn’t looking for Art but in a world full of loneliness miraculously he found her. They both take a leap into the unknown, leaving themselves more vulnerable than they have ever been. When Art turns up for a date over an hour late (he had trouble getting a pass to leave his base) Ruth tells him she was worried he wouldn’t come. “I hardly know you, really,” she says. “That’s when you gotta have faith,” he replies.

Art has faith. A stranger in a strange city, he asks Ruth out and is rewarded with the love of his life. At first she barely speaks, so he fills the silence, talking about his home and family and his civilian career as a journalist, winning her trust and putting her at ease. He knows Ruth is taking a risk too. When she agrees to go to the theatre with him, she brings her best friend along at the last minute. Both women are pleasantly surprised to find that Art had already bought three tickets. He was sensitive enough to expect her to bring a chaperone.

In spirit Art is a close cousin to Joe Allen, the soldier Robert Walker played in Vincente Minnelli’s wartime romance The Clock. Walker and Van Johnson were friends and when the latter first read Hecht’s book, he thought Art would be a perfect role for Walker and told him so. But by the time the film was made, Walker was dead. Johnson later said he thought about him every day on set. Yet he also made Art his own, giving him warmth and charm and transforming him into a beacon in Ruth’s life.

Ruth is sorely in need of light. Her only friend is her colleague Grace (the excellent Eileen Heckart), who despite being kind and loyal has also made a similar accommodation to loneliness. It takes Art’s presence for Ruth to hope for something more. Leaving the theatre, Art, Grace and Ruth pass an auction and Ruth impulsively buys Art an old Roman coin: a spontaneous gesture of affection from a woman who likely never imagined she could be spontaneous. She never had the chance. Jane Wyman shows Ruth blooming with great delicacy, slowly revealing the courage beneath her timidity.

There is more than one miracle in Miracle in the Rain. There is the resilience of the human spirit and the sudden joys that illuminate the darkest lives. Greatest of all there is our capacity to love and be loved in return.