User Reviews

The two other comments on this page apparently watched this Play for Today on British TV long ago. I can see why they speak of being moved and horrified by it. It's definitely horrific -- but it also seems ridiculously contrived and over the top, a fantasy designed to prove that, left to themselves, men are violent brutes who abuse women (and in this film beat, torture, and ultimately murder them) because underneath it all, you see, they fear them. So it's basically a sort of exercise in hating men, a fairly single-minded propaganda piece.

However, as if that weren't enough, the men's fear of women is intertwined with their fear of foreigners. These are the sort of paranoids who look for Nazi spies under their beds -- and it's all a figment of their imagination. In that regard, this postwar film is the opposite of the wartime British film "Went the Day Well?" (a far superior work), in which an isolated rural community actually IS invaded. In that one, we're told to fear the Germans; in this one -- reminiscent in theme of the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" -- we're told that WE are the enemy, with our xenophobic hysteria and misogyny.

For the record, the story takes place in the summer or fall of 1940, when Britain had well-founded fears of invasion. The setting is an almost cartoonishly perfect Isolated Rural Village, far from civilization, with only one telephone and no police presence. Curiously, there doesn't seem to be a single radio -- sorry, wireless -- in the entire town. The writer, David Pirie, is among other things a horror-film historian, and indeed this is a setting straight out of a horror movie. Though it's supposed to be in fen country, it's reminiscent, with its caricatured hostile locals, of the sinister village in "An American Werewolf in London." (P.S. I've read one of Pirie's books and just looked him up on Wiki. His profile turns out to be one of those self-promoting screeds that's actually put together by the subject himself, quoting tons of laudatory reviews and shamelessly blowing his own horn, though withholding basic biographical information. It reads like an extended press-release-cum-hagiography. I'm amazed that Wiki allows these sorts of things.)

The film's main character is an investigator, played by Charles Dance, who, though he towers over everyone else in the cast and has an air of authority, turns out to be completely ineffective, in fact worse than useless. The victims, in the end, are three Land Girls (in truth, Land Girls were warmly praised as heroes by grateful locals wherever they went), an improbably sophisticated, sexy young widow (Suzanne Bertish) with foreign connections and Communist sympathies, who quotes Yeats and seems suspiciously like a screenwriter's fantasy, and the acting village doctor, played by Lindsay Duncan, who's wise and gentle and essentially the voice of reason.

The villains are a handful of rifle-toting local farmers, somewhat reminiscent of the brutish locals in "Straw Dogs." They sit muttering together at the local pub; they enjoy shooting birds; somewhat improbably, they force the Land Girls to do the heavy farm labor while they eye them, smirking lustfully, like little dictators. But these deplorables are also, you see, fundamentally weak: their leader, so to speak -- the primary villain, played by Ian Hogg -- is a bully who gets shown up by one of the Land Girls when it comes to starting his tractor; another man is humiliatingly impotent; they're frightened of women who are having their periods; they fear the women are "witches," and they also fear they're Nazi spies (Pirie throws everything into the mix); they work themselves into a hysterical drunken panic over the prospect of a German invasion.

To make matters worse, when the ineffectual Dance attempts to avert the coming violence by running for help to an army base 11 miles away, the obtuse military types there refuse to believe him and, all too perfectly, proceed to lock him up, in part because the army base, too, is in a panic over the false invasion scare. Later, after the murders, a cynical government official played by Cyril Cusack steps in to cover up the crime. Ideally, if you've been following it all, you're supposed to be left in a blind rage at the injustice, hypocrisy, etc.

So basically what you have, in "Rainy Day Women," is as ugly a picture as possible of benighted, lazy, violent, hysteria-prone rural Englishmen whose fear of foreigners and fear of women combine, spurring them to commit mass murder. In both intention and result, it's a thoroughly nasty piece of work.