Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978)

Karel Reisz's adaptation of Robert Stone's award-winning novel Dog Soldiers is a brilliantly harrowing take on the effects of the hazy moral universe created by the Vietnam War. Nick Nolte stars as a jaded merchant marine vet at the end of his Vietnam hitch who agrees to smuggle two kilos of heroin into the States for equally cynical photojournalist Michael Moriarty. Released only a couple of years after the war's end, the film may have been too bitter a pill for audiences of the time to swallow, and it's since been unjustly neglected. So many things go wrong here for the credulous Nolte that if the stakes weren't so high or the atmosphere so poisoned by greed it could be played as a comedy of errors. He may be flawed, but when events drag he and Moriarity's bewildered wife (Tuesday Weld) into a nightmarish world peopled by corrupt federal agents and desperate skag addicts, it's not difficult to sympathize with Nolte's reflexive response that he's back in Vietnam. In fact, all of Stone's characters are so complex and well-written that it's impossible not to be engrossed by their behavior, however repellent. The abandoned commune at which the film's explosive, coruscating finale takes place is an apt image for the period's loss of faith. In a long and illustrious career, Nolte has never been better than he is here as the betrayed vet, and he's complemented by a superb cast, among whom Charles Haid especially stands out. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide