Word: postman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Back in 1934 James M. Cain wrote an exciting noval about passion, murder, a bum, and a girl who "really wasn't any raving beauty" but who had a sulky look to her. Now "The Postman Always Rings Twice" is here in the movies, with sheer quantity of kisses pinch-hitting for passion and Lana Turner for the sulky, Mexican-looking woman. Murder and the bum more nearly receive their due, the latter at the hands of John Garfield, but in no way does the picture generate the speed and intensity of the book...
Like "Double Indemnity" (also based on a Cain yarn), "Postman" involves the extra-curricular love affair of a married woman, the murder of the husband by wife and lover, and the net of justice that ensnares them. But where Barbara Stanwyck clearly was a woman powerless in the grip of passion, Lana Turner plays a peculiarly ill-defined character, driven in conflicting directions by muddled motives. Nor is Garfield, while more suitably cast, given a better organized role. The smaller parts are much neater; Cecil Kellaway as the husband and Hume Cronyn, as a lawyer who gets Miss Turner...
...Postman Always Rings Twice, at Loew's State and Orpheum. M-G-M's treatment of James M. Cain's novel about ham-and-eggs sex in California...
James Cain's new novel is set in the period of the War Between the States, but readers will not have to leaf far to discover that it is about the same hair-raising war-between-the-sexes that chilled U.S. marrows in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce. A well-told tale whose deadpan savagery suggests that it was written with the tip of an icicle, it features enough lust and mayhem per page to shame a pulp novel...
...Postman Always Rings Twice (M-G-M). When James M. Cain started writing his hard, high-strung little novels twelve years ago, it struck many screen-wise readers that he was putting on paper a kind of movie that Hollywood would never dare put on celluloid. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder sensationally proved how wrong that was, two years ago, with Double Indemnity, Ranald Mac-Dougall, Catherine Turney and Michael Curtiz followed up last year with Mildred Pierce, less expert yet crudely exciting. But the screen version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the first, most ferocious and in some...