The Post-Mark of Cain
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
Directed by Bob Rafelson; Screenplay by David Mamet
Bam BAM BAM goes the novel, with the collision force of mean men's fists or lovers' thighs. Chapter One: Frank and Cora meet. Two: they make big bloody love. Three: they plot the murder of her husband Nick. Four: the murder attempt fails. Five: they set out for a life on the road, then split. Six: Frank returns to her. Seven: this time they do kill Nick. Eight: they make love over his corpse. Nine: they are charged with his murder. Ten, Eleven, Twelve ... In bold, remorseless strokes, and fewer than 100 pages, James M. Cain etched a portrait of animal lust and human need, of mania and the Depression, of the original sin and spectacularly convoluted forms of retribution. Its narrative travels the arc of electricity from the first shock of sexual attraction to the final jolt of death-row juice. The 1934 novel was a banned-in-Boston bestseller, and moviemakers have sprained their backs ever since trying to get it right onscreen.
The new film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from Hollywood, Cora knows the only spotlight she is likely to appear in is the concupiscent glare from men across the counter. Frank knows he's several criminal convictions past a prime he never had. But his rutting passion for Cora offers them both the reckless hope of transcendence.
The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures. In part this is because The Postman appears at a time when moviemakers seem to have forgotten that the libido exists, in part because these scenes are the film's only submissions to spontaneity. This Postman is a true period piece-not 1934, but the early '70s, when American and European directors were investigating functions of the apocalyptic orgasm from behind a modernist screen. Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.