Rider on the Rain (1970)

Film: Rider on the Rain (1970)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Gabriele Tini, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Jill Ireland

Director: Rene Clament

Oscar History: No nominations, though it did get a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  France, however, in 1970 chose to submit Hoa-Binh, and wasn't nominated at all.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Charles Bronson's career as a movie star was bizarrely-timed.  Similar to actors like, say, Morgan Freeman & Samuel L. Jackson, Bronson spent decades after coming to Hollywood working in a host of small & supporting roles before getting top-billed parts in his 50's.  Like most of these men (and honestly even more so), Bronson did this in notably good movies.  While early roles had him playing occasionally in B-Pictures (like the Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax or the celebrated Roger Corman biopic Machine Gun-Kelly), he appeared in a number of really popular & classic movies in the 1960's, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sandpiper, & The Dirty Dozen, all of which had him in key supporting roles...but not getting the lead parts that were going to men like Richard Burton & Steve McQueen.  Bronson did, during this time frame, get a part you could arguably say he's the male lead in, Once Upon a Time in the West (he gets fourth-billing in the film, but of the three main men in the movie, he has the most screen-time), a film that was not a success when it was released to American audiences (it was filmed in Italy), but has since been considered by many to be a masterpiece.  I will go on record as saying it is my favorite movie of all-time (full stop), and Bronson is wonderful in it.

(Spoilers Ahead) But that changed in the early 1970's, as Bronson started to regularly to get lead roles, one of the first of which was Rider on the Rain.  Rider on the Rain is about a man named Henry Dobbs (Bronson), whom we don't realize until much later in the picture is not a true blackmailer or a cop, but instead a member of the military.  It's also true that much of Rider on the Rain is not really Bronson's movie-the main character in this (despite billing to the contrary) is Mellie (short for Melancolie, one of several cheeky monikers in this picture), played by French actress Marlene Jobert, who despite not being super well-known to American audiences now, was a regular lead presence in French films of the 1970's (and would go on to win an Honorary Cesar for her troubles in 2007).  Jobert & Bronson have a weird chemistry, one that feels at odds with his famed brevity as an actor (Bronson in virtually all of his roles speaks in short, clipped sentences...if you've never seen him, think something like Clint Eastwood but with slightly more inflection).

Rider on the Rain, though, would not be the prototype for a Charles Bronson picture, and that's a kind of a pity because while the film isn't very good, it is quite odd (and if you know me, you'll know I'll take "weird & not very good" over "boring but fine" any day of the week).  Jobert's Mellie kills a man who rapes her in the opening scene, and for much of the movie is trying to convince everyone around her (including herself) that she didn't do it.  It's a weird juxtaposition because in 1970 (and especially in 2026), the audience is rooting for her, and is fine giving her a pass for dealing out very direct vigilante justice.  She's also played strangely, with Jobert feeling at once a mature woman, one who is lusting after a shockingly jacked (the man's abs are incredible for being nearly 50 and not having modern workout techniques) Bronson, while also playing a "little girl" role in parts.  The film in many ways feels like a sort of New Wave take on Hitchcock, and some of the camerawork mirrors that (as does a twist at the end that I won't spoil even with the spoiler alert-you'll have to see the movie to find out).

The film also starred Jill Ireland in a supporting part.  Ireland is going to show up in one more movie we profile this month, but I'm going to take this moment to talk about her a little bit given that she was so crucial to Bronson's public persona.  Ireland & Bronson met in a rather nefarious way (she was married to David McCallum, Bronson's costar in The Great Escape, and according to legend Bronson told him that he was going to "marry his wife," which of course he would in 1968, and the two would star in 15 films together throughout the course of their career.  Ireland is important to understanding Bronson's public profile in part because she was in so many of his movies (and would even produce some), but also because he was famously shy.  Bronson rarely sat for interviews, so he didn't get the traditional cultivated celebrity-treatment that other stars would get as part of media coverage, but one thing the public knew about was his devotion to his wife.  You watch one of the rare interviews he did in the 1970's (with Dick Cavett) where he was joined by Ireland and you see the devotion, and by all accounts they had a very happy marriage.  We'll talk a little bit about this as we go along, but wanted to give Ireland her due alongside our month of Charles Bronson given she was such an important component in his filmography.