The Rain People

A disaffected Long Island housewife ditches her man, hits the road, and never stops heading west in Francis Ford Coppola’s striking early work, described as a female Easy Rider, overflowing with flashbacks and a loose energy that recalls the French New Wave. Like his heroine, Coppola abandoned both the ease and the restrictions of an enclosed realm—in his case, the studio system—and lit out for freedom; during filming, he and his cast and bare-bones crew (which included a young George Lucas) simply followed the roads west, shooting whatever they encountered along the way and tweaking the script accordingly.