The Rainmaker

THE MUSIC MAN may have owed something to this story, since both concern confidence men who come to small towns to peddle their scams, then fall for spinsters. Nash wrote the film as a television play then expanded it to work on the Broadway stage, where it ran 124 performances with Geraldine Page in the Hepburn role and Prud'Homme as her father, under the direction of Anthony, who also did this film and, later, the musical version, "110 in the Shade." Composer North garnered an Oscar nomination, as did Hepburn, her seventh. The main problem is that the film is far too talky, and the leads are somewhat grizzled for the situation. Hepburn is a hick-town spinster in a...