Movies - The Postman Always Rings Twice

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	Movies - The Postman Always Rings Twice

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a 1934 novel by James M. Cain that was made into three movies.

The 1946 film starred Lana Turner and John Garfield as the deviant couple, Cecil Kellaway, and Hume Cronyn. It was directed by Tay Garnett, with a score written by George Bassman.

Story

The story is one about a drifter who stops at a rural diner for a meal and soon goes to work there. The diner is operated by a young, beautiful woman and her much older husband of foreign extraction. The wife and drifter have an affair. The wife (the eventual femme fatale) is tired of her situation married to a man she does not love working at a diner that she wishes to own and improve. She and the drifter scheme to murder the husband in order to start a new life together without her losing the diner. Their first attempt at the murder is a failure, but they eventually succeed, and are acquitted of the crime at trial. They plan for a future together, but as they seem to be prepared to live "happily ever after" the woman dies in a car accident.

Except for two scenes in the 1946 version in which Turner wears black (one when she contemplates suicide and the other when she goes to her mother's funeral), Lana Turner wears nothing but white in the film. The film was also voted #49 on the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Love Stories list.

The title

The title is seen as something of a non sequitur; nowhere in the novel does a postman character appear, nor is one even alluded to. When asked for an explanation, Cain stated that the manuscript had been rejected by 13 publishers prior to being accepted for publication on his 14th attempt, so that when the publisher asked him what he wanted the work to be entitled he drew on this experience and suggested The Postman Always Rings Twice.

William Marling author of Hard-Boiled Fiction writes that the title may come from the most sensational news story of 1927 and 1928. This was the trial and execution of "Tyger Woman" Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray for the murder of her husband Albert. A circulation war among East Coast newspapers helped to keep the story on the front page for eight months and a sensational photo of Ruth Snyder's electrocution in the New York Daily News in 1928 later shocked the nation.

Ruth, 31, was a striking blond with "a gaze of Scandinavian iciness," who supposedly convinced corset-salesman Judd Gray, her lover, to bludgeon her husband with a sash weight and then to strangle him with picture wire. Though a mother, Ruth dressed like a flapper, stocked her basement with Prohibition booze, and liked to gamble. She focussed public fears about flappers as mothers. Gray was so short and dejected, the New York Times reported, that spectators thought him a dupe and compared him to Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp." He testified that, after sex, Ruth would claim her husband beat her: "I'd like to kill the beast," he'd respond heroically. "Do you really mean that?" she asked with interest. Beneath her cool surface, the newspapers detected a fiery "Tiger Woman."

Like Cain, Gray had gone to World War I an innocent and returned having tasted Europe's alcohol and freer sex. Prohibition was in force when he returned, with boyish, revealingly-dressed flappers everywhere. But when he married the women his parents liked, she bored him. Rather than let life pass him by, Gray cultivated a series of women, until he found Ruth. They kept a permanent suitcase at the Waldorf, where they met three times a week. The sex was apparently a revelation, and afterwards they shopped at Macy's or danced in nightclubs. It was an affair full of bad dialogue, an excuse for not missing what the "Jazz Age" offered.

Two aspects of the trial caught Cain's attention especially. Without his knowledge, Snyder took out personal injury insurance on her husband for fifty thousand dollars and double indemnity in case of death. She instructed the postman to deliver payment coupons only to her, ringing the doorbell twice as a signal. http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled/Cain%20James.HTM

1942 Italian version

A 1943 Italian film entitled Ossessione
(Obsession), directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti was based directly on Cain's story. Cain was not, however, given credit as the author. Wartime conditions would have complicated the pursuit of legal recourse for copyright infringement and none was pursued.

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