The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) - film review

Frank Chambers, an unemployed drifter, is touring the backwaters of California when he comes across a roadside café which has a vacancy for a handyman.  Frank allows the café’s amiable owner, Nick Smith, to talk him into taking on the job, although what makes up his mind is a salacious glimpse of Nick’s beautiful young wife, Cora.  From the moment they meet, Frank and Cora are consumed by an intense longing for one another and, without Nick knowing, they embark on a discrete love affair.  When, some time later, Nick announces that he is going to sell up the café and move back home to nurse his invalid sister, Cora is horrified by what the future appears to offer her.  She coerces Frank into helping her to kill her husband, making his death look like a road accident.  Attorney Kyle Sackett is not taken in by this deception and resolves to bring Frank and Cora to justice...

The third and best of the four film adaptations of James M. Cain’s popular yet controversial thriller novel The Postman Always Rings Twice is this suspenseful and highly sensual film noir, which features Lana Turner in her most memorable screen role.  Although MGM bought the film rights to the novel almost immediately after its publication in 1934, it was not until 1946 that the studio was able to come up with a treatment that was acceptable to Cain and the enforcers of the Hollywood Production Code.  In the interim, two foreign language versions were made – one in France:  Le Dernier Tournant (1939), directed by Pierre Chenal and featuring Michel Simon; the other in Italy: Ossessione (1943), directed by Luchino Visconti.   1981 saw the release of yet another version, directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, which is remembered only for its raunchy sex scenes.

The 1946 adaptation stands head and shoulders above the others, partly because it more successfully evokes the tension and sultriness of the original novel, but also because it has a narrative coherence and authenticity which the others perhaps lack.  Lana Turner is at her most overtly sensual in her startling portrayal of a femme fatale who has the outward appearance of an unblemished angel (she wears fluorescent white throughout most of the film) and the inner aspect of depraved hussy who appears capable of anything.  By contrast, what her co-star John Garfield provides is one hundred per cent animal machismo, the earthy counterpoint to Turner’s seductively cool femininity in what is surely one of cinema’s most torrid on-screen couplings.  Sidney Wagner’s lush, atmospheric black-and-white photography heightens the eroticism of this darkly illicit love affair whilst underscoring the tragic inevitability of the protagonists’ downfall, in true film noir fashion, making this a compelling and haunting variation on the themes of fatal attraction, sin and redemption.

© James Travers 2008

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