Who was she? Sometimes she was a child skipping rope. Sometimes she was a woman with a passionate hunger. And one day the woman and the child came together...

who cares about a 35 year old virgin?


Paul Newman made his directorial debut and Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, stars as Rachel Cameron, a 35-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who feels as though she's wasted her life. Rachel's best friend, Calla Mackie (Estelle Parsons), invites her to attend a religious revival meeting. Here Rachel is swept up in the emotional fervor orchestrated by a young guest preacher (Terry Kiser). This is the first of several cathartic incidents which convince Rachel to kick over the traces and express her own needs and emotions. She has a brief sexual liaison with an old family friend (James Olson), and is delighted at the notion that she might have become pregnant. Rachel ends up alone and childless (her "pregnancy" was nothing more than a benign cyst), but still determined to forge a new life for herself. Based the novel A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, Rachel, Rachel won New York Film Critics awards for both Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, and an Oscar nomination for Joanne Woodward


Time observed, "Stewart Stern often gets too close to the novel, adopting where he should adapt. Rachel is shackled with prosy monologues that should have been given visual form. Despite its failings, Rachel, Rachel has several unassailable assets . . . It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master. She peers out at the world with the washed-out eyes of a hunted animal. Her walk is a ladylike retreat, a sign of a losing battle with time and diets and fashion. Her drab voice quavers with a brittle strength that can command a student but break before a parent's will. By any reckoning, it is [her] best performance." [3]
Variety called it an "offbeat film" that "moves too slowly" and added, "There is very little dialog - most of which is very good - but this asset makes a liability out of the predominantly visual nature of the development, which in time seems to become redundant, padded and tiring . . . Direction is awkward. Were Woodward not there film could have been a shambles." [4]
TV Guide rated the film 3½ out of four stars, calling it "a small, understated, and very sensitive film" and adding, "It could have been a drab, weepy story, but Stern and Newman collaborated to make it an inspiring one that proves one is never too old to change one's life." [5]
Time Out London noted, "While in no way as powerful as Barbara Loden's Wanda, Newman's film none the less captures the quiet desperation of enforced life in sleepytown America.

Release Date: August 26, 1968


Distrib: Warner Brothers