8/10
Wartime In New York
17 January 2010
Miracle In The Rain is a good, but very strange film. You first start watching it and you think you're seeing a nice romantic film with a wartime setting. But it takes a very unexpected turn into the supernatural and in the end a miracle of sorts is actually performed. And right on the steps of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Jane Wyman is a plain jane sort of girl whose life consists of going to work and then getting home to tend to her ailing mother Josephine Hutchinson. Years ago the man of the household, William Gargan, walked out on the family and left Hutchinson the cynical and sickly soul that she is. So when Jane meets soldier Van Johnson during wartime he proves almost too good to be true.

Their love is intense in the short time they have before Johnson ships out. After that the film turns, first tragic and then mystical.

Other members of the cast who aid and abet Johnson and Wyman are people like Fred Clark as Jane's boss at work, a rebound man from way back, Peggie Castle who is Clark's mistress on the job, Alan King and Barbara Nichols a soldier and his new bride who Johnson and Wyman meet in Central Park and making their big screen debuts are Eileen Heckart as Wyman's best friend from work and Arte Johnson who plays an office boy where the girls work. No fool he.

Warner Brothers shot this film in New York which is why Heckart and Johnson who were based in New York got to work in this. It would have been nice if we had some color, but the black and white cinematography was nice. No doubt that Francis Cardinal Spellman himself must have had script approval of the whole project in order to allow scenes inside St. Patrick's to be done.

Though dated somewhat Miracle In The Rain is still a fine piece of entertainment and its message about true love never dying is one for all generations.
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