I've been in the mood for some classic noirs lately. After all, just last week I wrote about The Third Man. That's a personal favorite, and I've seen it many times. Right now my queue at Netflix is full of my favorite noirs, but with a few classics I never got around to mixed in. This is one of those; I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until early this morning I had never seen The Postman Always Rings Twice.
It's also the first time I've ever seen John Garfield, though of course I knew the name from studying the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I knew he was one of their main victims; though not a Communist, he was a well-known liberal, and he worked for good jobs for black and latino actors and crew, and of course he was Jewish, and that was enough for the fascists on the HUAC, who thought Hollywood could only be trusted to conservative christian racists. They hunted him relentlessly, had him blacklisted, and when he returned to Broadway (he got his start on the stage) even hounded him there. He had a bad heart, and they literally hounded him to death before he was forty. So I had some regard for Garfield as a martyr to liberal causes, particularly political freedom, but somehow that never translated into watching any of his movies.
Lana Turner, of course, I know. Even more than I love classic noirs, I love classic horror, and she was in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Spencer Tracy. That's how I know her best. I have that on DVD and will inevitably write about it, but for now I'll say that she was passably good in a passably good movie. Turner herself, though, always considered this her best role, and so I feel like I know her a lot better now that I've seen it.
The thing is, I'm not sure this really is a film noir. The genre is a little nebulous, but this doesn't have the sort of photography and camera tricks that you'd expect from a noir, and the characters are subtly different. The overall drift of the story is pretty standard for the genre, to be fair. A drifter, Frank Chambers (Garfield), takes a job at a roadside gas station/burger joint, owned by affable middle-aged Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway). Frank and Nick's beautiful young wife, Cora (Turner), fall in love. Nick wants Cora to run away with him, but Cora refuses to give up the restaurant; she knows Nick will cut her off without a penny if she divorces him, and she doesn't want to return to the life of wage slavery. So the young lovers murder Nick, and spend the rest of the movie wilting under suspicion and turning on each other while still being unable to resist each other.
Like I say, fairly typical. It's in the details that this distinguishes itself from the typical fare of the genre. Cora is not your everyday femme fatale. In the first place, she doesn't seduce Frank; he seduces her, and in fact is a bit more aggressive in his courtship than modern sensibilities would be perfectly comfortable with. She not only resists Frank, but goes out of her way to demonstrate that she is happy with Nick. Nick himself sort of drives them together. There is one scene that seems almost comical with regards to Nick's cluelessness: he plays guitar and asks Cora to dance. She doesn't want to, because she doesn't want to turn Frank on, so she says that she feels silly dancing alone. Frank offers to dance, but Cora says that she and Nick should turn on the jukebox and dance together. Nick insists, saying that he would rather watch dancing than dance himself, so Cora says they can't dance in the living room anyway, since there's not enough room. So Nick moves them all into the restaurant, where instead of dancing to the light tune Nick had been playing on his guitar, they dance to a sexy latin song on the jukebox, with Cora getting more uncomfortable by the moment. In a more modern film, you'd almost expect Nick to be the kind of man who likes to watch his wife having sex with other men.
The idea that it would be nice if Nick died occurs first to Frank, not Cora, though it is Cora who insists upon going through with it, and who plans and carries out their first attempt on Nick's life. That's more typical, and we begin to feel more comfortable with the plot, but it doesn't really last. When the second attempt works, but Frank is injured, the District Attorney, Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), briefly convinces Frank that Cora actually intended to kill them both; Frank signs a complaint against her, and both murder and attempted murder charges are brought against Cora. At this point Cora turns on Frank, but we understand why: if he had trusted her and stuck to their original story, there would have been no evidence to convict them. Frank's statement might well send her to the gallows. She turns fierce then, and yet it's hard not to side with her against Frank. I wonder if that wasn't less true in 1946; maybe back then a woman who had turned on her husband was automatically more to blame than the lover who had helped her, but to a modern audience she is far more the injured party.
Also, I'm sympathetic to Cora when we learn that Frank plans to sell Twin Oaks (the road house) and move to Canada to take care of his paralyzed sister. He hasn't even considered Cora's feelings, which is especially bad since he's committing Cora to becoming a nurse for his sister. She doesn't want to spend the best years of her life washing and cleaning up after a woman she's never met and has no loyalty to. We might well revere a woman who was willing to make this sacrifice for her selflessness, but we don't condemn a woman who isn't that selfless; the selflessness is notable because it's so rare, and I doubt many of the folks watching the movie (or reading this) would be willing to make this sacrifice, and so if we're fair, we can't think less of her for her unwillingness. Just in case we can, Frank has to stop Cora from committing suicide over it.
It's the only moment where Nick is the bad guy, and of course it's the impetus to the second, successful murder attempt. We can feel, and sympathize with, Cora's desperation here. Something clearly has to be done. Of course, in the real world, we would want Cora to divorce Nick rather than murdering him, but she still has our sympathy to some extent.
I've been thinking about Out of the Past, and Jane Greer's role in that. Greer's Kathie is the perfect model of the character type, and I've always referred to her as the most fatale of all femmes. Greer begins that film as the sort of dangerous, amoral woman that Cora becomes in this one, the woman who fights off the blackmail attempt, who threatens to turn Frank in as revenge for his infidelity. I think that perhaps what makes Cora so memorable is that she isn't a femme fatale; rather she becomes one during the course of the story, and we get to watch it happening. In effect, I fell like this is how Kathie became Kathie.
In this genre, we usually watch the hero make mistakes, fall gradually into a state of despair and degradation, and usually he does this under the influence of a character like Kathie. In this movie we watch her make mistakes, bad decisions that seem to be her only option in desperate moments. She is the nascent belle dame sans merci. And then of course there's the end of the film, where she is willing to sacrifice herself in order to regain her humanity and the love and trust of her relationship with Frank; very few femmes fatales have done the same, and we almost feel that she dies with a clear conscience.
In effect, within the regular tropes of the noir, she's the hero and Frank is the femme fatale. It's a great and, within the genre, unique role. No wonder Turner thought it her best. So, how is she in it? Well, I've always considered Turner to be very much of her time, I think. Most of the things I've seen her in seem fairly dated now. Look at her contemporary, Ingrid Bergman. When we watch Casablanca or Notorious we belong to her; her star power is undiluted by the years, and I don't think we can say that about Turner. On the other hand, when we watch someone like Jean Harlowe, she's almost a joke. It's hard to understand what anyone ever saw in her. Turner is somewhere in between. She isn't Bergman's equal, but she's risen a lot in my estimation. The years have somewhat diminished her, but she is still powerful, and I doubt anyone else could have played the part better.
You get solid support from Ames and Hume Cronyn (as Cora's lawyer), and also from Audrey Totter in what amounts to a cameo appearance. I love Totter, no matter what she does. The big supporting role, the one that makes the film work, is Kellaway's, though. Aside from the one scene I mentioned above, he's just so likeable, so naïve and trusting. He just feels like a nice guy, and that's another important distinction between this movie and many similar ones: we don't get to feel that the plot against him might be justified, like in Out of the Past. He's just too...well, again, nice. If he's an ogre, this movie loses half its power.
Garfield is very good as Frank, as well. Like I said, I don't know his work well, but I like him. He's nearly as emotionally complex as Cora. He feels very natural in the part, not like he's playing a rough-and-tumble tramp, but like they cast a rough-and-tumble tramp in the part and let him play himself. I've moved Body and Soul, which I've always heard was his defining film, up to number one in my queue; this movie makes me want to see more of him, because this is really about Lana Turner. Even though Garfield has more screen time, even though it's told from his perspective and largely through his narration, this is her movie, a great performance in an iconic role. Everyone else in the movie is secondary.
BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: I'm saying the story. Just the complexity of it, the way Cora's and Frank's feelings for each other change constantly throughout the film. As good as Turner and Garfield are, they have a lot to work with. It's an accomplishment, so let me give credit to screenwriters Harry Ruskin and Niven Bush, and also maybe to James M. Cain, who wrote the novel the film is based on. I haven't read it and don't know how true they are to the original, but regardless Ruskin and Bush did some fine work here. The dialog is only pretty good, but the way the story unfolds is definitely special.
WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The direction and cinematography aren't bad, but they aren't really noirish enough, in my opinion. I suppose that makes sense, since neither director Tay Garnett nor DP Sidney Wagner had worked much in the genre. It's perfectly well-shot, don't get me wrong, but it isn't quite what I wanted. I'm a bit unforgiving with my noirs.
SCORE: 8/10
LISTS: Favorites of the Forties
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