Sunday, December 29, 2024

The Postman Always Rings Twice (MGM, 1946)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 28) I kept on Turner Classic Movies after their showing of The Last Detail for the welcome return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program after a week’s hiatus so they could do a week-long marathon of Christmas movies. For his last showing of 2024 Muller chose the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he said was the most commercially successful of all the films noir of the 1940’s. He documented that with a photo of people lined up for blocks outside the Capitol Theatre in New York to see the movie, which was double-billed with, of all things, live performances by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians. I had read the James M. Cain novel on which it was based in the early 1970’s, when I was developing my love of mystery stories in general and the hard-boiled variety in particular – as I’ve mentioned many times before, film noir came about when German expatriate directors who settled in Hollywood during the Nazi regime and the Americans who learned from them realized that the heavily-shadowed chiaroscuro look of Weimar-era German films was an effective way to dramatize the hard-boiled crime dramas of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and other writers in that style. Muller said something I hadn’t known before: MGM bought the movie rights to Postman almost as soon as the book was published in 1934, only just as they were about to film it the Legion of Decency struck and demanded that Hollywood get serious about enforcing the Production Code. Realizing that Cain’s tale of adultery and murder would be a hard sell to Joseph Breen, the man in charge of enforcing the Production Code, MGM put Postman on the back burner and didn’t take it up again until 12 years later, after Paramount and Warner Bros. had successfully filmed other Cain novels: Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, respectively. (I’ve long marveled at the irony behind Above Suspicion, the last film Joan Crawford made under her original MGM contract. When it came out it starred Crawford and Fred MacMurray, both of whom were considered over the hill. Within two years both of them had made major comebacks in stories by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.)

When I first saw this in the early 1980’s I thought it was a misbegotten movie. John Garfield was superbly cast as Frank Chambers, drifter who comes on a combination gas station and lunch room at the edge of the California desert, gets hired by the station’s owner Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway, truly odd casting given that I’m used to seeing him in all those 1950’s sci-fi movies in which he played the scientist who wanted to reason with the monster and ended up getting himself and some of the down-cast members killed) and ended up falling in lust with Nick’s wife Cora. The problem with the movie was Lana Turner, whom MGM picked to play Cora. This was actually the first time I ever said, “This would have been a better movie with Barbara Stanwyck in it,” mainly because Stanwyck had played a James M. Cain femme fatale to perfection in Double Indemnity two years earlier, and if she’d been in Postman she could have brought the film the same intensity she’d brought to Double Indemnity. I liked Turner a bit better than I had the last time. I’ll give her credit that when the script (by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch) allowed her to get angry and scream, she rose to the occasion. But anything short of that eluded her; when she comes out dressed in a white shirt and matching white shorts and we’re supposed to think that the mere sight of her evokes John Garfield’s lust, she looks more like an animate sex doll than a woman reveling in her sexual power. The Postman Always Rings Twice deals with the growing sexual tension between Frank and Cora, which leads them both to murder Nick and fake it to look like an accident. Their first attempt is short-circuited – literally – when a cat crosses the wires just as Cora is about to do in her husband in the bathtub. Their second, which involves Frank clubbing him to death while the three of them are riding in Nick’s car, also goes awry. They knock him off, all right, but the car doesn’t descend into the obligatory ravine far enough to be credible with the story they’ve worked out, so Frank gets in the car again and this time drives it off the proverbial cliff and barely escapes with his own life.

Both attempts are witnessed by the local district attorney, Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), who takes a Javert-like dislike to Frank even before Frank has done anything illegal and spends an awful lot of time staking out the establishment just to catch him in something illegal. Though Sackett doesn’t witness Nick’s actual murder, it’s he who happens to be driving along when Cora escapes from the ravine where they’ve left Nick’s car and rescues her. Once she and Frank are both in custody over Nick’s alleged murder, Postman becomes a much more interesting movie as it begins to revolve around the corruption of the legal system. Sackett is assigned to prosecute the case against Cora, while her lawyer is an even scummier character: Arthur Keats (Hume Cronyn). Keats insists that Cora leave everything up to him and not interfere with his decisions, even when he decides to plead her guilty. Ultimately he and Sackett, who are depicted as good friends outside the courtroom who have a $100 bet going on the outcome of the case, reach a plea deal in which she’ll plead guilty to manslaughter and the judge will give her a suspended sentence and probation. Cora uses the $10,000 in insurance money she got for Nick’s death – which she insists she didn’t know about before she and Frank knocked him off – only there’s a smoking gun out there: a confession Cora signed stating that she and Frank plotted Nick’s murder together. She gave this to Ezra Liam Kennedy (Alan Reed), whom she thinks is an operative from Sackett’s office but is really a private investigator working for Keats. When Kennedy left Keats’s employ, he took Cora’s signed confession with him and now attempts to blackmail her and Frank with it. Ultimately they overpower him and destroy the original and all copies of the confession, but Cora gets worried that people will start talking about the two of them living together in the desert. She has the bright idea of having them marry each other, even though by now all sparks of love, or even lust, have burned out between them and Frank drifts into an affair with a woman named Madge Garland (Audrey Totter, who also could have played Cora better than Lana Turner did!). Ultimately Frank and Cora decide to abandon the diner and flee to parts unknown, only just as they’re doing so they’re involved in an auto accident, Cora dies, and Sackett has Frank arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for her murder.

Cain’s novel savored the irony of that ending – Frank gets away with the murder he actually committed but gets executed for one that really was an accident – though the ending had to be softened for the film in a tag scene in which Frank has confessed to the prison chaplain (the source of the voice-over commentary we’ve been hearing from him all movie) while Sackett, listening in, tells Frank that even though he knows Frank didn’t intentionally kill Cora, his execution will punish him for the killing he did commit. Postman was directed by Tay Garnett, who in the early 1930’s had done some important proto-noirs set in the South Pacific, notably Her Man (1930) starring Helen Twelvetrees. He also made One-Way Passage (1932), in which William Powell and Kay Francis play doomed lovers aboard a steamship – he’s on his way to prison and she’s been diagnosed with a fatal disease – which in Kay Francis’s later years was the only film she’d made that she thought was any good. Later Garnett broadened his subject matter and made the delightful Hollywood comedy Stand-In (1937) with Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell and Humphrey Bogart. Garnett’s direction of Postman is effective but not what it could have been; for something that’s supposed to be a film noir, an awful lot of it takes place out in the open, in the middle of the California sun. Garnett and his cinematographer, Sidney Wagner, do precious little in the way of dark, chiaroscuro lighting, so it qualifies as a film noir thematically but not visually except in a few isolated scenes. The Postman Always Rings Twice had already been filmed in France and Italy in bootleg versions before this MGM release (and the Italian version, Ossessione – which means “Obsession” – was made in 1942, suppressed by Mussolini and the Catholic Church, and survived only in a print director Luchino Visconti hid under the floorboards of his home), and in addition to the official remake from 1981, directed by Bob Rafelson, written by David Mamet (who reverted to the original Greek last name, “Papadakis,” of Nick’s and Cora’s characters), and starring Jack Nicholson as Frank and Jessica Lange as Cora. according to Muller there have been innumerable versions of the basic plot from other countries. It’s a real pity this one isn’t better than it is, but MGM wasn’t exactly the studio you went to for films noir, especially before Dore Schary arrived as co-head of production in 1948 and brought a noir sensibility with him from his previous studio, RKO.