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It seems that an aging spinster, Miss Clara (Ruth White), who had mentored Thomas in his pre-prison days, now refuses to let him live with his wife. A drunk Thomas gets involved in a knife fight and faces a return to prison unless he does what the spinster wants. Miss Clara lives in a Gothic-style house similar to the one Mrs. Bates did in Psycho. (At one point, when Thomas comes to visit her on her deathbed, there is even a foreboding climb up the stairs that strongly resembles Detective Arbogast’s in Hitchcock’s film, right down to the overhead camera angle.) As this story spins on interminably, the spinster dies, and Thomas must go back to prison; while saying goodbye to his wife and child, he makes one final and futile attempt to escape on the back of a speeding truck, but fails to make it and dies on the highway.

The film is a mess. The black and white looks both faded and tired (this was the last black-and-white film Steve would appear in). Steve looks tired, too, in a script that, in addition to every other hanging plotline, never connects Thomas to his music (at a time when singer-songwriters were the most connected-to-themselves performers of their generation). The acting is overheated but doomed by Horton Foote’s tepid script. Foote, who had won an Academy Award for his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, would go on to win a Pulitzer for his play The Young Man from Atlanta, and would eventually write a legitimately great movie about a failed singer, 1983’s Tender Mercies. But his screenplay for Baby the Rain Must Fall failed on every level. And Mulligan, Pakula, and Columbia (and probably Foote, too) knew it, and agreed to push back its release to January 1965. It was the month following the big Christmas holiday season when studios dumped their worst films.3

Neile, who had come to New York with Steve for the duration of production on Love with the Proper Stranger, had little use for Steve’s co-star, suspecting (rightly, as it turned out) that Remick and Steve were having an affair during its making. According to Neile, Steve came home during production of Baby the Rain Must Fall one night and simply, almost matter-of-factly, told her that he had been sleeping with Remick. Neile forgave her husband and blamed Remick, against whom she would hold a lifelong grudge. Years later, according to Neile, when Steve wanted to use Remick in another film, Neile prevented it from happening.4

And finally, after completing work on the film—his fourth of the year and the thirteenth of his career, plus ninety-four half-hour episodes of Wanted: Dead or Alive, several live-TV one-offs, and his stage work—Steve, feeling burned out, exhausted, and disappointed by what he perceived was his failure at becoming a bigger movie star, and believing now he never would be, at the age of thirty-three years old, stunned Hollywood by announcing he was retiring from film.

* * *

1 The others in the top ten were, in order, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, John Ford’s How the West Was Won, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, Terence Young’s Dr. No, Stanley Donen’s Charade, and George Sidney’s Bye Bye Birdie.

2 It was released on DVD in 2009.

3 The Mulligan/Pakula team lasted for three more movies before breaking up, having never been able to regain the level of success they had had with To Kill a Mockingbird. The three were 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover, which starred Natalie Wood; 1967’s Up the Down Staircase; and 1968’s The Stalking Moon, with Gregory Peck and Eva Marie Saint.

4 Remick, who died relatively young in 1991 at the age of fifty-five from cancer, always denied the affair.

Bullitt, 1968.

It’s very expensive to act, in both time and money. I don’t advise [it].… Be prepared to give all else up and live a straight life. That includes eating and sleeping right. You should see some of life so that you can feel life, and put it into use in your acting. Learning stuff on the streets helped my acting a lot.

—STEVE