Here's That Rainy Day

"We were sitting in a room at the Berglund...rain beat very hard against the windows."

Those are opening lines from Raymond Chandler's 1934 short story "Killer in the Rain." We've been thinking a lot about rain this week--who hasn't?--and remembering rain in songs and stories and films. There is Somerset Maugham's famous short story called simply "Rain," and the clever 1954 play "The Rainmaker," and the 1939 film "The Rains Came," with a turbaned Tyrone Power swept up in torrents meteorological and emotional.

Among the great rain songs is "Right as the Rain," by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. (The expression "right as the rain" dates from 1894, coined by farmers happy that drought had ended. In the dust bowl years of the 1930s, they sang "It ain't gonna rain no more, no more/It ain't gonna rain no more/How in the heck can I wash my neck/When it ain't gonna rain no more?")

"Soon It's Gonna Rain" is from "The Fantasticks," by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. Irving Berlin wrote "Isn't It a lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain?" and "I'm Just a Fella with an Umbrella." "Here's That Rainy Day," perhaps the best of the rain songs, was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke for a forgotten show called "Carnival in Flanders." But who can forget Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain"?

And if all this rain is getting to be too much for you, here's the antidote: re-read "The Sun Also Rises." By Mark Madryga.