Word: noires
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...managed to hide itself behind its silver screens, and the news from the Coast was usually good. People were dancing out there. And singing. And repenting. During the war, though, a whole new style of movie started skulking out of the Coast. The French labelled it film noir, but coining the phrase was about as close as Gallic sensibilities could ever get to it. No Frenchman could truly understand a city like L.A., and that, metaphorically at least, was what film noir was all about. The term was used to describe a slew of films, the likes of Double Indemnity...
...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...
...hovers over the details in his sets until the smallest of them seem laden with meaning. He approaches each seene as if they were miniatures in and of themselves, and they are often brilliant. The colors are all diffused to give the stylistic impression of the earlier noir films. But he seems to construct his films like a mosaic, and it results in a completely discordant sense of pace...
...Shepard, better known as a playwright than as an actor, successfully portrays Cal's violent transition from skeptic to zealot. Shepard's brooding, understated intensity adds a dash of noir to the film...
Lawrence Sanders' novel could serve as the basis for a taut, lurid little film noir, but this adaptation is as plodding and routine as most police work-or as a police novel unredeemed by narrative surprises or a galvanic prose style. The plot doubles back on itself and wanders off on pointless tangents. A subplot involving Delaney's critically ill wife (Faye Dunaway) is never integrated into the manhunt story, and Dunaway is wasted in a role that keeps her flat on her back. Mostly, she is forgotten as the gumshoe and the hobnail boots approach each other...