LRPA After Dark features 1932 film "Rain" with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston

LACONIA — Join Lakes Region Public Access Television at 10:30 p.m. this Friday and Saturday night for the "LRPA After Dark" presentation of 1932's melodrama "Rain," starring Joan Crawford and Walter Huston.

"Rain" was an adaptation of a play by W. Somerset Maugham. It was first performed by in London and then later on Broadway and created quite the scandal in its day. The story was made into two other films: 1928's silent "Sadie Thompson," with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore, and 1953's highly sanitized "Miss Sadie Thompson," with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer. The 1932 version is the closest to Maugham's play, and the one that was made during that brief period of time known as Hollywood's "Pre-Code" years, between 1929 and 1934. "Rain" has a frank sensuality that is lacking in the other adaptations, and portrays Sadie Thompson as exactly what she was: a prostitute with an unsavory past.

"Rain" depicts a struggle between Sadie Thompson (Crawford), a "woman of ill repute" and the puritanical and moralistic missionaries Alfred and Martha Davidson (Huston and Beulah Bondi).