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| The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) | |
| Background
Director Tay Garnett's fatalistic film is best known for one of the hottest portrayals of a sultry and seductive femme fatale - it is one of Lana Turner's finest performances. The film was advertised with posters that described the illicit passion between a drifter (Garfield) and a married-unsatisfied waitress (Turner) in a roadside cafe:
Their killing of the woman's husband ultimately leads to their mutual destruction in unexpected ways. This great and sexy film noir, however, received not even one Academy Award nomination. This dark melodrama was the third screen adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice - the previous two were Pierre Chenal's Le Dernier Tournant (1939, Fr.) and Luchino Visconti's first feature - the unauthorized Ossessione (1943, It.) with the setting transferred to Fascist Italy. A fourth, present day re-make, with cruder sex scenes between drifter Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, was director Bob Rafelson's 1981 rendition. The StoryThe film begins with a MAN WANTED sign at Twin Oaks, a California roadside diner/luncheonette and gas-station, and voice-over narration:
Hitchhiking drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield) sees the fateful sign and asks for the car to stop. The young wanderer explains to the driver of the car (soon identified as Kyle Sackett, the local district attorney) why he keeps "looking for new places, new people, new ideas," and can't settle down:
Frank tells amiable, easy-going proprietor Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) that he has itchy feet and a wanderlust to see the world: "They keep itchin' for me to go places." To get him to accept the job as handyman and mechanic, Frank is offered a free hamburger and room and board, along with a modest salary: "A fine bed, box spring and mattress. Fresh air, sunshine, boy, you'll be living." After placing a raw piece of meat on the grill, Nick attends to a gas customer outside. Frank's first look at hot-blooded, voluptuous Cora (Lana Turner) [he doesn't know she's the wife of the cafe owner] is prefaced by her lipstick case noisily rolling across the floor of the cafe toward him. The camera tracks back to her nude slim legs in the doorway. Frank looks at all of her - she is provocatively sexy and scantily clad in white shorts, white halter top, and white turban. [She continues to dress in ironically virginal white (except for two scenes) throughout the entire picture, accentuating even further her passionate, white-hot, torrid steaminess.] He sets his eyes on the whitish platinum-blonde woman, bends down and picks up her lipstick, and asks: "You dropped this?" She stands with her hand outstretched, waiting for him to bring it over to her. But he holds onto her possession in the palm of his own hand and then leans back on the counter - she struts over and takes the case out of his hand. Cora applies lipstick with a small vanity mirror, and then shuts the door to the adjoining living quarters of the cafe. He turns toward the grill when he senses that the hamburger is burning - analogous to his own "burnt" soul after being tempted by her. Frank accepts the job as handyman, symbolized by the burning of the "MAN WANTED" sign in an outdoor fire. [The "MAN WANTED" sign suddenly becomes a double-entendre, as if Cora had been advertising her desires for a new man -- and to do a "job" for her --- murdering her husband.] Nick is pleased to fill the job: "That's it. Burnin' up. I'll go tell my wife you're gonna stay." Frank immediately has second thoughts, calls after Nick: "Your wife?", and removes the sign from the pyre, but replaces it in the flames when he sees Cora leaning back in the doorway of the cafe and gazing at him. That evening, Cora asks her husband if he could give the newly-hired man a "week's salary and let him go" - fearful of the consequences of their close proximity to each other. The social milieu in which they live is frustrating for Cora - her husband penny-pinches whenever he can, and he is twice her age. When Frank and Cora officially meet and speak for the first time, she begins bossing and sizing him up - he makes suggestive advances toward the untouchable yet glamorous woman.
He grabs her and plants a kiss on her lips. She reacts with great poise - she pulls out her vanity mirror, cleans up the smudged lipstick on her lips, and then reapplies the lipstick before leaving - without a word. Frank describes how he suffers from her reserved reaction for weeks afterwards in a first-person narration:
Cora complains to Frank that it has been impossible for her to convince her husband to replace the drab, torn-down, wooden sign for Twin Oaks. Frank easily persuades Nick to borrow the car to run the sign into town to get it fixed, arguing that it needs a new design as well: "Your sign doesn't make me hungry." After his success, Frank brags to Cora, with a machismo double-entendre:
In the next scene, at nighttime, both Cora and Frank admire the newly-installed electric neon TWIN OAKS sign, blinking on and off toward the highway. Their own figures are alternately lit and darkened [they both represent two opposite poles themselves - he is the dark 'beast' and she is the light 'beauty']:
To entertain them, the middle-aged, affable proprietor strums on a guitar and sings a tune about his own marriage:
Although she has "practically forgotten" how to dance, and is reluctant to dance with Frank in front of her husband, her resistance breaks down when she is encouraged to do so by the jovial Nick. They dance to a Latin tune from the jukebox. Hot-blooded Cora's passion rapidly begins to swell to the danger point - she quickly curtails the dance by pulling the plug on the jukebox: "Save your strength, Nick. It's too hot to dance." To cool off, she departs in her white bathing suit to swim in the ocean. She is startled that Frank has already taken the driver's seat and is accompanying her for a swim:
She shrugs, allowing him to join her. In the moonlight, they both run toward the breaking surf and play together in the water. After returning, Cora is considerably more friendly and suggests making a lemon meringue pie for Frank the next day. Responding with a weak "please don't" when Frank approaches to kiss her, she is receptive to a passionate good-night kiss.
Frank stares down the last remaining coffee and doughnuts customer, and then sets the 'closed' sign on the cafe front door. He approaches Cora in the kitchen as she is washing dishes. She tells him that she married the good-hearted man when taken in by the promise of security and wealth - but she compromised herself by entering into a loveless marriage:
Breathlessly, the voluptuous Cora succumbs to Frank's promise of adventure to escape her life of boredom and defeat, and her marriage of convenience. They plot to run away together, and she writes an explanatory note to Nick:
After placing the note in the cash register, they walk from the cafe to the highway, her arm in his, and with their luggage under Frank's arm. Cora is sorry that they don't have Nick's car and must hitchhike:
On the road, Cora has no real desire to live the unpredictable, drifter-type existence that Frank is accustomed to. In their first few hours, she tumbles backwards into the dust and soils her pure-white dress, sweats in the heat, steps in tar, and tires quickly, longing for the financial security of the restaurant business:
They hurriedly return by bus to Twin Oaks, arriving just before Nick does. Immediately, Cora destroys the note left for Nick in the cash register. Together, they hatch the idea of a murder plot after witnessing the near-collision of an inebriated Nick narrowly avoiding a freight truck:
Drunk and silly, Nick accuses Frank of being a "thief" when he notices the packed suitcases. Cora defends her lover: "You're crazy, Nick. Why Frank's not a thief. All of a sudden this afternoon, he got an attack of road fever and said his feet were itching for a new place." And then she explains how Frank has changed his mind about leaving: "Frank's road fever wasn't very serious. In fact, he forgot all about it as soon as I promised you'd pay him three dollars more a week." In his retrospective narration, Frank remembers how fatal his decision to stay became. Cora's smoldering sexuality is a trap which pulls Frank further toward murder and a defiant form of love:
After denying him a chance to speak, Cora, the quintessential femme fatale, sneaks into Frank's room later in the evening to talk about their future on her own terms. The lovers plan to murder the woman's unloved husband - and it is the unfaithful wife Cora who plants the idea of murder into Frank's head so that they can be together. The ambitious, yet soul-less seductress argues that with her husband dead, she would inherit the financial security of the restaurant:
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The
Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is one of the best film
noirs of all time - and one of the earliest prototypes of today's
'erotic thrillers.' The screenplay (by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch)
was based on the controversial first novel/pot-boiler (1934) of
the same name by notorious writer James M. Cain. Cain was known
for novels with forbidden lust, love triangles, brutal, raw sexiness,
and adultery-motivated murder. Two previous, sexually-charged classic film
noirs adapted from Cain's novels had met with both critical
and box-office success: MGM's