I think the fact that Mike Hodges is British is essential to Black Rainbow (1989). When one looks at a foreign culture one sees little about it that is common place. So when Hudges turns his camera onto American culture, more specifically the Bible Belt, he sees details as strange or uncanny that otherwise wouldn’t be perceptible at all. This lends Black Rainbow a sense of the unknown, since Hodges’ personal remoteness from the culture permeates every frame, as well as a feeling for detail that sets the film in a distinctly Southern venue.
In the midst of all of this is the story of a traveling medium named Martha (Rosanna Arquette), her father and manager Walter (Jason Robards) and the reporter, Gary Wallace (Tom Hulce), covering Martha’s disturbing prognostications of death. Black Rainbow is a thriller, but Hodges plays with the devices of that genre to probe humanity’s relationship with faith and spirituality. Hodges is really quite effective in this regard, particularly during the climax where it’s unclear as to which image of Martha is the real person and which is imagined or even a spiritual projection. The entire cast is really brilliant, particularly Rosanna Arquette.
There are elements of the Southern Gothic, neo-noir, and of John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979) folded into the visual textures and script of Black Rainbow. It deals with a particularly American kind of horror and anxiety where faith is commodified then mass produced so that abundance is mistaken for authenticity. The world that Martha and Walter live in is at the very edge of that system; their venues are old churches in the poorest of neighborhoods. To be central to that process where theology and capitalism combine as media spectacle is Walter’s dream and Martha’s fear. Hodges is smart enough to know that to play out that aspect of these characters their own faith must remain relatively ambiguous and fluid.
Black Rainbow is a really good film that has always been caught in a kind of limbo. It was given the most limited of releases theatrically only to be followed by just as few home video releases. The latest home video release of Black Rainbow by Arrow Video is an excellent package that I hope will raise the profile of this film.
