The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) – one way or another …

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) – one way or another …

Review by Jack Kost

Hard times reveal peoples' true natures.

Often the worst side.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), was directed by Bob Rafelson, and released in the United States on March 20, 1981.

His previous notable directorial credits include: Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), also starring Jack Nicholson.

The screenplay, by David Mamet, was based on the 1934 hardboiled novel of the same title, by James M. Cain.

David Mamet’s writing and directing credits include: House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), Hoffa (1992), and Heist (2001).

Set during the depression era, Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson) is a drifter with a criminal record, an opportunistic petty crook and conman, thumbing rides on his way to wherever he can make a fast buck.

He pulls a fast one at a roadside gas station and diner: conning the owner, Nick (John Colicos) into giving him a free meal.

Nick also sees an opportunity and hires Frank as cheap labor.

Nick’s beautiful wife, Cora (Jessica Lange), immediately catches Frank’s attention.

With no better prospects, Frank takes the job.

Frank and Cora are bad people.

Selfish to the point where it can be said they ultimately deserve each other.

Frank is the kind of man who will smile to your face and then knock you down for the cash in your pocket.

Cora makes up the trio of opportunists.

She married Nick not for love, but as a way out of hardship; only succeeding in marrying out of one hash house into another.

Cora is a scheming femme-fatale: a vamp, fully aware of her seductive power.

She is bored, dissatisfied, and unhappy in her marriage to Nick, an older and oafish drunk.

He’s no better; coarse and insensitive, selfish in his own way, taking Cora for granted.

Cora feels neglected, used, and trapped.

Nick tells Cora he has a surprise for her, but it turns out to be a silk robe he bought for himself.

When Frank and Cora first make love on the kitchen table, the coupling is as violent and desperate as it is passionate.

Frank is ready to leave, suggesting to Cora that they both just take off together and leave Nick.

Cora is worried that Nick would come after them and sooner or later he’d catch up and she’d face his retribution.

Frank and Cora see in each other a way out, a way to a better future, a life together, with Nick’s business as their own.

The dynamic of the situation can only go one way.

It was never going to end well.

Nick is in the way.

Nick may not deserve the brutal end Frank and Cora inflict on him, but it’s still difficult for us to feel any sympathy for him.

After a failed attempt to kill Nick, the balance of power shifts between Frank and Cora and, fearing she will lose Frank, seduces him into murder:

CORA:

I gotta have you, Frank. If it was just us. If it was just you and me.

FRANK:

What are you talking about?

CORA:

I’m tired of what’s right and wrong.

FRANK:

They hang people for that, Cora.

Beneath the passion, there is a coldness to this movie, as cold as Frank and Cora are to Nick and, at times, each other.

It’s this cold, cruel, selfishness that prevents us from sympathizing for how they end up.

The novel has been filmed several times, with plays adapted for radio and stage, including an opera.

The 1981 movie version is superior in its gritty realism.

The script and actors were not constrained by the censorship of previous times; they could tell it like it played out in the author’s imagination.

Although harshly criticized on its release, the movie has endured and stands as a high-point in the careers of all involved.

The supporting cast includes: Michael Lerner, John P. Ryan, William Traylor, Ron Flagge, William Newman, Albert Henderson, Christopher Lloyd, Jon Van Ness, and Brion James.

The color tones in the movie are subdued, mostly varying shades of brown, reflecting the drabness of the times.

The music, by Michael Small, evokes an atmosphere of the time, in a neo-noir setting of drama, seduction, infidelity, deception, and murder.

Frank and Cora’s doomed relationship swings from love to hate.

How can a relationship, borne out of infidelity and murder, marred by suspicion, hope to survive?

Frank has a lazy streak, and a weakness for gambling.

When Cora goes out of town to visit her ailing mother, Frank shirks responsibility when left alone.

He closes the diner, takes off, encounters a traveling circus, and cheats on Cora with a wild cat tamer, played by Anjelica Huston.

Cora discovers Frank’s betrayal and takes it badly.

It further confirms Frank’s true nature, adding fuel to the fire of their already unstable relationship: cheaters cheat.

If they cheat with you, chances are they'll cheat on you.

It also confirms a double-standard in Cora: it was one thing Cora cheating on Nick with Frank, but another thing entirely when Frank cheated on her with another woman.

What goes around comes around.

If events had panned out different for Frank and Cora, they might have become victims to their own nature.

Stuck in another rut.

Frank may have found himself meeting a similar end to Nick.

It’s an old story.

A cautionary morality tale of stupid, selfish people making stupid, selfish choices.

Highlighting a recurring bad choice many people make, generation after generation: the mirage of the grass seeming greener on the other side of the fence.

It isn’t.

They fool themselves into thinking the new lover will be the perfect partner, able to provide them with the perfect life.

They quickly learn the new partner comes with faults and problems of their own.

The trip to the other side of that proverbial fence is often one-way.

The wrong choice is made, the bridge is then burned and, like Frank and Cora, they find themselves in a worse situation.

They may cheat the hangman, but life, fate, justice, karma – whatever you choose to call it – has a way of ringing twice.

Recommended reading - Jealous Woman by James M. Cain (1950)

Jealous Woman

Jealous Woman

by James M. Cain.

 

First published in 1950.

Published by Black Lizard Books.

Paperback.

 

ISBN-10: 0887390889

ISBN-13: 978-0887390883

 

Description:

An ambitious Reno salesman. A wealthy would-be divorcée. An insurance policy. It’s a toxic combination in this noir thriller by an MWA Grand Master . . .

Jane Delvan had dark, red hair and plenty of shape of a nice, refined kind. To Ed Horner she was only a little fancy flirtation under the Nevada moon, but he found some peculiar circumstances developing when Jane’s husband, Tom Delavan, himself came to town, followed very shortly afterwards by his first wife, the beautiful but jealous Lady Sperry.

Ed wondered what kind of game Jane Delavan was playing with him, leading him on as she was? And why should Lady Sperry take a heated interest in him of a sudden? What were the cause of secret midnight callers roaming at will through hotel bedrooms? Suddenly Ed Horner found himself slowly being ringed about by a group of hard-hating, highly emotional people who all had motives that involved them in a case of murder and the Jealous Woman.

If Las Vegas is a city of lovers, in Reno, the business is divorce. Six weeks in Reno can erase the darkest marriages, and the only question is how to pass the time – craps or roulette? Jane Delavan is a roulette woman, a stately beauty from back East who is too classy for the motel where she’s shacked up. She’s come for a divorce, but her husband has other ideas. He wants an annulment, and in exchange offers to take out a $100,000 insurance policy on himself – just in case something happens to him before their paperwork goes through. Jane is cunning enough to make sure that if she wants something to happen, it will. Ed Horner is the insurance agent sent to settle the agreement, and it doesn’t take long for Jane to settle him. They fall in love over twenty-five-cent roulette and soon have a bigger score in mind. In the Biggest Little City in the World, a king-size scheme is brewing . . .

“Cleverly plotted.” – The New York Times.

“Swift and absorbing.” – The Wall Street Journal.

 

Recommended reading - Sinful Woman (1948).

Sinful Woman (1948).

by James M. Cain.

 

ISBN 13: 9780887390890

ISBN 10: 0887390897

 

Description:

“Cleverly plotted.” – The New York Times.

“Swift and absorbing.” – The Wall Street Journal.

A starlet comes to Reno to start a new life – and end her old one forever. Sylvia Shoreham’s Hollywood dreams came true long ago. Critically beloved for her beauty, talent, and style, she was on her way to international stardom when a bad contract committed her to seven years of trashy comedies and half-baked melodramas. Her marriage to her producer husband has become a rotten, loveless sham, so Sylvia’s silver screen life verges on a nightmare. To escape her celluloid hell, she has only one option: Forget Hollywood. It’s time for a Reno vacation. She comes to Nevada hoping for a divorce from her husband, Vicki, and an end to her contract, but the ugly side of the business follows her. To protect herself from Vicki, she enlists Nevada’s biggest Sylvia Shoreham fan. He’s six feet tall, strong as a mule, and just happens to be Reno’s sheriff. When her divorce turns into a war, this Hollywood icon will be glad to have him on her side. 

Recommended reading - The Magician's Wife (1965)

 

The Magician's Wife (1965).

by James M. Cain.

Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Paperback.
 
ISBN-10: 0887480187
ISBN-13: 978-0887480188
 
Description:
 

In The Magician’s Wife, Cain returns to his classic themes of lust and greed. Clay Lockwood, a business executive, falls in love with the irresistible Sally Alexis, wife of a professional magician. Their story is one of the inexorable process of “wishes coming true” – the realization of which was always, for Cain, “a terrifying concept.”

James M. Cain was born in Annapolis in 1892. He lived and worked in Hollywood for seventeen years, and spent the last years of his life in Hyattsville, Maryland. His work, especially the best-sellers The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Butterfly, is known to millions in this country and abroad.

Recommended reading - Double Indemnity (1943)

Double Indemnity (1943).

by James M. Cain.

 

Published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.

Paperback.

 

ISBN-10: 9780679723226

ISBN-13: 978-0679723226

 

Description:

“An American masterpiece.” – Ross Macdonald.

Walter Huff was an insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.

“No one has ever stopped reading in the middle of one of Jim Cain’s books.” – Saturday Review of Literature.

Recommended reading - Mildred Pierce (1941).

 

Mildred Pierce (1941).

by James M. Cain.

Published by Vintage Crime / Black Lizard.
Paperback.
 
ISBN-10: 0679723218
ISBN-13: 978-0679723219

Description:

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements James M. Cain created a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and suffering are never less than recognizable.

Recommended reading – The Cocktail Waitress (2012)

 

The Cocktail Waitress (2012)

by James M. Cain.

 
Hard Case Crime.
Published posthumously.
Hardcover.
First edition.
 
ISBN-10: 1781160325
ISBN-13: 978-1781160329
 
Description:
 
Grieving widow … or black widow?

day Joan Medford buried her husband was a fateful one – because before the day was out she’d meet the two men who would change her life forever. Forced to take a job waitressing yo support herself and her child, Joan finds herself caught between the handsome young schemer whose touch she comes to crave and the wealthy older man whose touch repels her … but who otherwise would make a tempting husband number two. It’s a classic Cain triangle – brutal sexual and stark – that can only end in death. But for whom, the guilty … or the innocent?

 

The final novel written by James M. Cain and never before published, The Cocktail Waitress is a testament to the enduring power of one of the most acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century. The author of unforgettable noir classics such as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s work remains as impossible to put down today as when first written, and will leave even jaded modern readers breathless. Featuring an afterword by Edgar and Shamus Award-winning editor Charles Ardai. One of the most celebrated and notorious crime writers of all time, James M. Cain launched his career with the publication of two back-to-back masterpieces – The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity – selling millions of copies worldwide and inspiring classic movies. Cain continued with an unmatched run of noir novels including Mildred Pierce which inspired both the Academy Award-winning film starring Joan Crawford and the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet. Cain died in 1977. And that’s where everyone thought the story ended. But James M. Cain had one more story to tell – one last blistering tale of sex and greed, betrayal and deception, written at the end of his life but never published – The Cocktail Waitress. Destined to take its place alongside his other classics, The Cocktail Waitress is Cain at his brutal and seductive best.

 

"Here, long after anyone would have expected it, is the voice of James M. Cain, as fresh and as relevant as ever. The Cocktail Waitress will involve you, and then shock you with an ending you'll never forget. A true rarity: a reader’s novel that’s also a literary event." – Stephen King.

Born on this day – James M. Cain:

 

Writer

July 1, 1892 – October 27, 1977

Credits:

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934); Double Indemnity (1936); Serenade (1937); The Embezzler (1940); Mildred Pierce (1941); Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942); Career in C Major: And Other Fiction (1943); Past All Dishonor (1946); The Butterfly (1947); Sinful Woman (1947); The Moth (1948); Everybody Does It (1949); Jealous Woman (1950); The Root of His Evil (1951); Galatea (1953); Mignon (1962); The Magician's Wife (1965); Rainbow's End (1975); The Institute (1976); Cloud Nine (1984); The Enchanted Isle (1985); Sixty Years of Journalism (1985); Pulp Frictions: Hardboiled Stories (1996); The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000); Writing Los Angeles (2002); Murder On The Railways (2003); Los Angeles Noir 2 (2010); The Cocktail Waitress (2012); Books to Die For (2012); A Bad Woman (2015); The Movie Book (2016).

Movies and television:

Algiers (1938); Blockade (1938); Buai laju-laju (2004); Butterfly (1981); Cineficción Radio (2021); Double Indemnity (1944 / 1973); Everybody Does It (1949); Girl in the Cadillac (1995); Gypsy Wildcat (1944); Interlude (1957 / 1968); ITV Play of the Week (1960); Konto ausgeglichen (1959); Kraft Mystery Theater (1963); Lux Video Theatre (1954–1956); Mildred Pierce (1945 / 2011); Money and the Woman (1940); Obsession (1943); Out of the Past (1947); Passion (1998); Puissance de la parole (1988); Serenade (1956); She Made Her Bed (1934); Slightly Scarlet (1956); Stand Up and Fight (1939); Teledrama (1957); The Last Turning (1939); The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 / 1981); The Postman Always Rings Twice: The Radio Play (1947); The Shanghai Gesture (1941); They Gave Him a Gun (1937); Today (1969); When Tomorrow Comes (1939); Wife, Husband and Friend (1939); Yu hai qing mo (1967).