Word: postman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...probably apocryphal, but they say that the original version of The Postman Always Rings Twice inspired Camus to write The Stranger. It's pretty difficult to imagine old Albert sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie that oozes of sex and murder, and coming up with the notion of nobility in the face of the Abyss. It's easier to picture Mickey Spillane sitting there with a bunch of his corporate-thugs and coming up with the idea for a whole series of pulp thrillers. Maybe there's some meaning lurking in the fact that we were gushing over...
...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...
...Cora in The Postman, Jessica Lange is tall and erect and self-possessed. Her anarchic blond hair frames a face dominated by classic cheekbones and sulfurous dark eyes, suggesting a Faye Dunaway who does not yet know she is beautiful. She has the strength and solidity of a heroic sculpture-Maillol's Leda, perhaps-a peasant-goddess rooted in the earth. With this performance, Lange has passed from the status of minor curiosity as the heroine of Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong to that of respected actress and, maybe, star. Jack Nicholson thinks so: he calls...
Lange is more modest, as befits an actress on whose erotic and dramatic appeal The Postman will succeed or fail at the box office. "That kind of ferocity can happen to any woman or man," she says. "When it happens, the emotions are magnified a hundred times. The erotic is basic to life, and it's basic to the film's story. If people see it that way, I'll be very pleased...