Word: nicholsons
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...tell why. He has an obsession with isolated, emotionally-distant characters, and he shows them with remarkable clarity. One wonders, though, if he's really exploring them. The King of Marvin Gardens might have been his best movie, but it was hell to sit through even though Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern were clearly doing something extraordinary. He's a maker of strange hybrids, this Rafelson, and with The Postman Always Rings Twice he has made another of his mutant masterpieces...
...Postman Always Rings Twice (no one knows what the title alludes to), like the scripts to practically all the noir classics, is a treatise on lust and betrayal. Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson), is a small-time drifter with a record of petty crimes, who is being drawn into L.A.'s vortex out of sheer statis. As James Cain conceived him in the 1934 novel. Chambers is a sardonic son of a bitch with no past to speak of, and no future worth mentioning. On his way to the city, Chambers drops off at a roadside diner to scam a meal...
...Nicholson always has an aura of unnatural tension around him--he seems to wait a split second too long before reacting, and even then all of this extremes, violent or boyish, flash out of those same, perpetually half-shut eyes. With his hairline receding and the lines of his face hardening now into some sort of death mask. Nicholson doesn't try to play Chambers as the twenty-three year old punk Cain envisioned. Instead he slouches around like a bored satyr. He seems to revel in his decay, in his unnerving ability to play an utterly reptilian Don Juan...
Rafelson clearly knows the depth of Nicholson's talent because the camera is constantly moving in for those tiny flashes of expression that probably would have been lost with another director. This is one of the elements that makes the movie feel so masterful--Rafelson wants you to notice the facial ticks and pulsing veins in his quick close-ups. He is no less indulgent of Jessica Lange as she goes through her role of the petulant hellcat. Again and again. Rafelson sets up scenes that point to her vicious, fatal beauty, to give the sense that it is doomed...
...Nicholson says that the kitchen-table scene was acted "at a pretty high energy level. You film two people making love, and it is not simple sex. It moves out of reality into an erotic ballet that touches everything: compulsion, love, death. Jessica made me sexy. She does that. Few are the men who do not want to fall at her feet. She's a big, consensus movie sex bomb." Miss Scarlett, meet Mr. Butler...