According to one critic, there are no fewer than six film versions of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (Yakir). This 1934 American roman noir was so influential, in fact, that the existentialist author Albert Camus penned his classic L’Etranger after reading Cain’s text. The novel tells the story of a drifter who goes to work for the owner of a roadside restaurant and gas-station and his younger and fatally attractive wife. Frank, the drifter, forms an obsessive attachment to this woman, Cora, and the two embark on a torrid affair that results in the murder of Cora’s husband, Nick. When the two are caught and taken to trial, however, they turn on each other, and the story spirals to a climax in which the lovers reap their own self-destruction. The novel’s shocking violence and unbridled sexuality has repeatedly caused scandal in its various adaptations to the silver screen. This paper will examine two of these versions, the 1946 film directed by Tay Garnett and starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, a classic film noir that relies heavily upon symbolic imagery to depict sex and violence; and, the 1981 film version adapted by David Mamet, directed by Bob Rafelson, and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, a “neo-noir” which reflects the relaxation of industry censorship in its graphic depiction of sex and violence. It would not be unusual to assume that the liberalization of Hollywood’s censorship codes would reflect a general liberalization of cultural attitudes, but as the following discussion will show, both film versions work to mediate their particular cultural concerns, and neither can be so easily classified as more liberal or progressive than the other. By investigating the filmic representations of concerns over sex and violence, gender roles, and race in these two films, it can be shown that despite a decreased censorship in the more contemporary filmmaking era, there are still many cultural issues and anxieties that are not made explicit but are symbolically present and problematized in the text of these films.

It is a significant coincidence that James M. Cain published The Postman Always Rings Twice in the same year that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America established the Production Code Administration which began enforcing industry censorship. When MGM studios purchased the screen rights, the PCA immediately banned filming of the story. It was not until after World War II when film audiences had become used to seeing graphic documentary-style violence in war propaganda films and newsreels and after the release of Billy Wilder’s breakthrough noir based on another of Cain’s novels, Double Indemnity, that Tay Garnett was able to start filming his picture (Chinen Biesen). Despite postwar relaxation of censorship, the film was still subjected to certain important limitations. Sex scenes were absolutely unthinkable to present, especially Cain’s sado-masochistic sex scenes involving murder. The film’s lack of graphic sex and violence, according to one critic, “loses Cain’s mood,” even as the plot itself remains predominantly true to the content of the novel (Yakir 18). In order to acquiesce to the demands of the censors and portray the passion and boundless desire of the characters in the story, the filmmakers relied upon the conventions of film noir. Fatalism and violence are suggested in deep shadows that cut across backdrops through Venetian blinds like prison bars, and dark rooms visually consume the lovers. Sex is portrayed metaphorically through the use of metonymy. Lana Turner is introduced to the camera via a tube of lipstick that rolls across the floor, suggestive of runaway sexual desire, and the first image the audience sees of her is her bare legs. Scenes at the beach stand in for scenes of sexual intercourse, and water is symbolic throughout the film of dangerous repressed desire, perhaps most significantly as a murder weapon in the couple’s first attempt to kill the husband in the bathtub. Although the spectator never sees scenes of sex or violence, both are present throughout the film through these signifiers acting as a kind of code that can be found in similar films noirs of the era. What it lacks in realistic depictions it makes up for in expressionistic mise en scene. By contrast, the 1981 version places sex and violence on the table, literally and figuratively. Mamet’s script stays true to Cain’s scenes of sado-masochistic sex, and in so doing, the filmmakers present a fascinating inquiry into the intersections of sex and violence in the spectrum of human desire. As neo-noir, realistic depictions of taboo sex become metaphor for primal human desires, transforming the text into a kind of allegory. In an interview, Mamet explained that, “It’s a 4000 year-old story: the aging man with the young wife, who wants to precipitate some violence, sexuality, regeneration and so takes on a younger, more virile stranger to their house” (Yakir 21). Yet, through these realistic sex scenes, the audience is led to believe that a genuine bond has been precipitated by all this rambunctious “love-making” between the anti-hero and the femme fatale. The attraction is powerfully presented, but the suspicion and vicious resentment between them is lost. In fact, director Bob Rafelson describes the film as a “love story” in which “two disconsolate people have found a happiness that transcends their traps and their own limits” (Thomson 27). But, this interpretation loses the existentialist thrust of Cain’s narrative in which the two lovers must “sink or swim” together, and are subsumed metaphorically in a sea of their desperate obsession for one another. Whereas the 1946 version ends with the accidental death of Cora and the wrongful execution of Frank for Cora’s murder, the 1981 version concludes with Frank weeping over Cora’s dead body, an image that evokes Frank’s redemption through love more so than his inescapable guilt and self-destruction. It is also difficult to believe that the violent impulse that emerges between Cora and Frank could be satisfied totally in the murder of Cora’s husband, nor is the motivation evident for Cora’s sudden faith in Frank and her willingness to sacrifice her prerogatives for a family with the man who once betrayed her. The ending of the 1981 version thus feels like a tacked-on recuperative gesture.

The status of Cora in these films is another important point of departure in comparing the two versions. In the 1946 film version, Cora is depicted as a classic femme fatale. According to Janey Place, the femme fatale archetype is characterized by her association with sexual desire, violence, and unrestrained ambition. Although Jessica Lange’s portrayal of Cora in the 1981 film also connects Cora with sex and violence, Lana Turner’s Cora insists upon the dangers posed by a woman with an appetite for wealth and prestige. Critics have located film noir’s preoccupation with the overly-ambitions woman in its postwar socio-cultural milieu (Place 50). After WWII, women were expected to give up the careers they held “for the duration” while the men were overseas, and fears of women’s enhanced earning powers and the possibility that they might resist a return to the home became embodied in films about women who would stop at nothing to, in Cora’s words, “be somebody.” Throughout the 1946 film version, Cora’s preoccupation is not so much sex or violence, but money. “Nothing in here is cheap,” she says as she works to improve her lot in life by revamping the little roadside eatery. “Aren’t we ambitious,” retorts Frank, and then he attempts to derail her greed by silencing Cora with a kiss on the mouth. For Cora, then, sex and violence are merely means to an end. She dreams of being independent, but finds she is inescapably bound in the first place to her husband and in the second to the man she finds to help her murder her husband. This important difference between Cora’s and Frank’s respective motivations works to heighten the tension between them. Even as the destruction of the femme fatale connotes the repression of the ambitious and autonomous woman, her strong presence in classic films noirs indicates a progressive shift in American gender roles. Place argues that, “[the femme fatale] is not often won over and pacified by love for the hero, as is the strong heroine of the ‘40s… the visual style gives her such freedom of movement and dominance that it is her strength and sensual visual texture that is inevitably printed in our memory, not her ultimate destruction” (Place 63). Although Lana Turner’s Cora refuses to give in to her domination until the moment she is killed, Jessica Lange’s Cora in the 1981 film version gives in readily to male control and eschews personal ambition. This more contemporary take on the femme fatale is principally concerned with the control and containment of female sexuality rather than female economic independence. Although some critics have interpreted the violent sex scenes as emblematic of authentic female sexual desire unleashed, the scenes between Jack Nicholson (Frank) and Jessica Lange (Cora) could also be described as scenes of rape and violence (whether sadistic or masochistic) against the female body, particularly during their first encounter when Nicholson forces himself upon Lange, and she resists. The repression of female sexuality is visually represented by the wild cat left by the gypsy circus performer (Anjelica Huston) with whom Frank (Nicholson) has an affair. Cora releases the cat into the bedroom in a fit of rage, but Frank successfully cages the animal, and shortly thereafter, Cora accepts Frank’s marriage proposal. In this version, the action is not motivated by Cora’s ambition, who now shies from the limelight when customers flock to her restaurant to catch a glimpse of the notorious murderess, but rather the plot is driven by an attempt to appropriately channel and restrain Cora’s sexual desire. The murder of Cora’s husband is only immediately necessary after it is revealed that Nick wants Cora to bear his child. Cora tells Frank tearfully, “the only man I could have a child by is you.”

This statement is further complicated by the fact that Nick is emphatically ethnic, so that the concern being voiced in the film is not only the ambiguous status of women’s sexuality, but also fears of miscegenation. Early in the 1981 film version Frank asks Cora, whose husband is identified as Nick Papadakis, “are you Greek?” “Do I look Greek to you?” she retorts sarcastically, indicating an absence in her physical appearance of the stereotypic and grotesque ethnic traits highly visible in her foreign husband. Throughout, the film emphasizes Nick’s ethnicity with scenes of his new restaurant sign featuring a Greek flag, as well as scenes depicting his large ethnic family and Greek celebrations, and connecting his ethnic origins with his vices, such as a penchant for ouzo and wine. Nick also forces Cora to speak Greek in order to belittle her. The filmmakers successfully create an unsympathetic image of the murder victim which preserves the couple in the audience’s good graces, yet it does so through an unambiguously racist characterization. In the 1946 interpretation, Nick’s ethnicity is unimportant. The filmmakers change Nick Papadikis’s surname to Smith, and except for a momentary suggestion that a woman might be a “gypsy,” all references to race or ethnicity are effaced. This is not to say that the film has nothing to say on the subject of race relations in postwar America. Good and evil are visually summarized in the stylistic play of white and black. Lana Turner wears nothing but white, even her hair is extremely blond. Only when she intends to commit an act of violence does she wear black, and then she is filmed in black clothing from turban to toe. As with censored images of sex and violence, film noir deals with the controversial topic of race in a symbolic manner. Racism persists in the 1946 version, yet by linking race with the femme fatale instead of the murder victim, race gains cultural status. According to one critic, “It was always said among Black women that Joan Crawford was part Black, and as I watch these films again today, looking at Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, I keep thinking ‘she’s so beautiful, she looks black’… there was a way in which these films were possessed by Black female viewers” (Oliver and Trigo 3-4). Like femininity, race in the femme fatale becomes a threat and therefore a mark of power and even pride. It may be that this portrayal was contingent upon censorship codes which repressed racialized characters in American cinema, but it is nonetheless interesting to note that a potentially more liberal or progressive view of race was present in the 1946 version and lacking in the more contemporary 1981 version of the same text.

Based on the preceding discussion, the differences between these two versions of Cain’s story can be summarized in the differences between the concerns of classic noir and those of contemporary filmmakers. The classic noir version presents an existentialist drama embedded in the psychological motivations of the characters in the story, whereas the updated version plays up the melodramatic love story and concludes with a naively optimistic view of the power of romantic love to seduce women into postures of sexual submission. Whereas the classic version ignores problems of race and gender in order to highlight the frightening world of the human subconscious, leaving open the possibility for transforming the dynamics of race relations and gender stereotypes, the 1981 version places heavy emphasis on race and gender which universalizes the motivations of the characters. The most obvious and striking lack in this latter version is in the ending. The classic version presents the full extent of Cain’s intended conclusion, the destruction of all the characters which is central to the meaning of the original text. Frank explains to his priest right before his execution for the murder of Cora that the “postman” represents his inescapable fate. Even if you don’t catch the postman the first time around, he explains, the postman always rings twice. In the 1981 version, this explanation is absent, which makes sense since in this version the postman does not ring twice as Frank escapes his fated execution. In spite of the ramped up sex and violence in this film, perhaps it is the ending that is most terrifying of all. While the classic version insists that individuals must atone for their sins, the contemporary version lets the anti-hero go free, and perhaps even redeems him through the self-sacrifice of the femme fatale.

Katie Zerwas

Works Cited

Chinen Biesen, Sheri. “Raising Cain with the Censors, Again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).” Literature/Film Quarterly. 2000; 28, 1; Proquest Direct Complete, pg. 41.
Oliver, Kelly and Benigno Trigo. Noir Anxiety. Minnesota: 2003.
Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. pp. 47-68.
Thomson, David. “Raising Cain.” Film Comment, 17, Mar/Apr 1981, pp. 25-32.
Yakir, Dan. “The Postman Rings Six Times.” Film Comment, 17, Mar/Apr 1981, pp. 18-20.
Yakir, Dan. “The Postman’s Words.” Film Comment, 17, Mar/Apr 1981, pp. 21-24.