The Postman Always Rings Twice (M-G-M). When James M. Cain started writing his hard, high-strung little novels twelve years ago, it struck many screen-wise readers that he was putting on paper a kind of movie that Hollywood would never dare put on celluloid. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder sensationally proved how wrong that was, two years ago, with Double Indemnity, Ranald Mac-Dougall, Catherine Turney and Michael Curtiz followed up last year with Mildred Pierce, less expert yet crudely exciting. But the screen version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the first, most ferocious and in some ways best of Cain's novels, suggests that the vein is running out.
There is nothing wrong with the story that wasn't wrong in the first place. The bum (John Garfield) still chances in at the roadside eatery, gets one good eyeful of the sex-starved wife (Lana Turner) of the lardy, trusting proprietor (Cecil Kellaway), who bought her underprivileged soul but not her overendowed body; and decides to settle down to serious work for a change.
Almost as amoral as zoo exhibits, they struggle feebly against temptation, maunder miserably into a plot to murder the man who stands in their way. They attempt their clumsy bathtub murder, bring off an equally clumsy auto murder, face sure conviction, and are rescued in one of the most reptilian bits of legal chicanery that ever made fiction look almost as strange as truth. They are hounded by blackmailers; they are tortured still more severely by their inability to trust each other; they come at last to a surprise ending which, in the novel, had much the force of a mule's kick. Scripters Niven Busch and Harry Ruskin have had to tinker amazingly little with this hideous story.
The picture is directed by Tay Garnett, one of Hollywood's surest and most honest handlers of melodrama (Bataan, The Cross of Lorraine). Its chief players, Garfield and Turner, are box-office naturals. The forlornly prosperous roadside menage is an excellent set and there is, throughout, an unusual feeling for mannerism, place and atmosphere. The supporting work of Hume Cronyn and Leon Ames as lawyers is so good it. knocks a hole right through the picture.
Lowering Cain. Indeed, it is hard to see quite what goes so dismally wrong, most of the time, but here are a few things that clearly do:
John Garfield is so familiar in the toughman role that his mere presence threatens the audience's capacity for belief. Lana Turner is a very highly charged and appealing girl, but too much in this role is far beyond her experience, her understanding, even her sincerely overworked imagination; her only fine, authentic moments, barring one searing flare of jealous hatred, are casually domestic and flirtatious. Much of the Turner-Garfield dialogue, which needs the flickering intensity of adders' tongues, is paced and keyed like an erotic discussion between a couple of cats. Finally, a kind of overall rigor artis of anxiety, sincerity and division of purpose chops the scenes badly apart—like oranges in a Christmas stocking.
This might have been the Cain to end Cains—and is more likely to do that in quite a different way. But not at the box office. There, considering the stars and the shock value, it ought to gross its weight in uranium.