The Postman Always Rings Twice

What a fantastic book. At just over 100 pages it feels as full as a book three times its size, with enough turns to keep things unpredictable the entire time. The noir sex & violence doesn't feel forced like in many later adaptations, the spiralling romance and tension is the backbone of the story, not thrown in titillation. It feels like it could have had a dozen different endings along the way, and you're almost torn between wanting to see someone make it out or to have them all punished for their sins. As the foreword notes, despite noir being adopted and immortalized by Hollywood, they couldn't actually put to screen what Cain wrote even decades after morality rules and an attempt to ban the work.
Notes on the edition: One of the show more slimmest FS volumes, yet richly and fittingly illustrated (but don't look up the illustrations as they spoil the main story beats). Fully bound in cloth with a blocked design, Abby Wove paper. show less

I was under the mistaken impression for an embarrassingly long period of time--based on the title alone--that between the cover lay a schlocky romance about an adulteress and her mail deliverer. It is neither schlocky nor romantic and there was nary a postman is in sight, much to my relief.

What it is is the tale of an abusive relationship between a tornadic tramp and a listless married innkeeper who is swept up in his path of inevitable destruction. The moral of the story, if I now understand the title correctly, is that there's only so long you can dodge your fate; eventually the mail gets delivered.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The road to Ensenada, on the other hand, “is plenty wide and fast.”

The source of the former declaration is a beatified Frenchman, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms: “This proverbial statement probably derives from a similar statement by St. Bernard of Clairvaux about 1150… ‘Hell is full of good intentions or wishes.’”

The latter observation derives from the venerable Lyle Lovett, whom the centathlete exalts and has seen in concert five times over two decades. In the title track of his 1996 album, “The Road to Ensenada,” we hear the Mexican town portrayed as a destination for American wantonness:

But down here among the unclean/
Your good just comes show more undone

During a taped session, Lovett related that the song was inspired by one of many motorcycle trips with his close friend, the eminent guitar builder Bill Collings, whose devotees include Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Joni Mitchell and the unequaled Nigel Tufnel. A comment to the video states: “this is Lyle’s first Collings dreadnought (East Indian rosewood / German spruce) from 1979 built out of Bill’s two-bedroom apartment on Bingle Rd in Houston.”

The same model guitar appears in this performance, a duet with John Hiatt of the exquisite heartbreaker, “Nobody Knows Me.” In this older track, which the singer has evidently labeled “a cheating song about Mexican food,” Lovett describes the ease of infidelity once you leave the country:

But it was a dream made to order/
South of the border/
And nobody knows me like my baby/
And she cried man how could you do it /
And I swore that there weren't nothing to it

Frank Chambers, protagonist of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, knew what Lovett was singing about. He tells us, “Ensenada is all Mex, and you feel like you left the U.S.A. a million miles away.” The remoteness brings perceived freedom from consequence, and Chamber cheats on his wife Cora when he visits the town with a brand new acquaintance. Through the swiftness and ease of his carnal error, Chambers affirms Chris Rock’s claim that “a man is as faithful as his options.”

Back in the U.S.A., when Cora finds out, she confronts Frank and cries. Rather than swear there was nothing to it, like Lovett’s sad cowboy, Frank offers man’s only other excuse: “She didn’t mean anything to me.”

Frank’s appraisal of Ensenada adds to the distinct waft of racism that appeared earlier in the narrative. When a restaurant patron mistakes Cora for a Mexican, she says, “I’m just as white as you are.”

Frank overhears this retort and subsequently speculates about Cora’s availability despite her marriage to the older Nick Papadakis. He says, “It was being married to the Greek that made her feel she wasn’t white.” Frank jabs with the epithet “the Greek” to denigrate and depersonalize the man he’s about to cuckold.

In fact, Cora wanted the patron to know that she’s superlatively white and American, as evidenced by the fact that she comes from Iowa. This form of proof brings to mind Superman, who first appeared in 1938, and his extreme American-ness, as Michael Rizzotti noted:

“…Superman lands in a corn field in the Midwest. His adopted parents are white, Anglo-Saxon and in all likelihood protestant (WASP). The question is, why the Midwest? He could very well have landed in a native, Jewish, African, Arabic, Mexican, Italian, or Chinese neighborhood in any of the US’ [sic] thriving big cities. The reason is that during the period in which Superman was popular, to be American meant to be white Anglo-American.”

Frank and Cora’s Depression-era bigotry adds ugly honesty to the narrative. Cora’s remark is a small sign of her limited perspective—and of her desperation and savagery that will surface later.

Previously, by marrying Nick Papadakis, Cora had escaped aimless, sordid poverty as an L.A. floozy, to end up as an Old World fairy tale heroine (lowly girl rescued from drudgery by prince). But the marriage proves unsatisfying because Cora, a modern woman with her own drive, wants more than a comfortable life at a wide spot in the road—she wants to achieve the American dream. Her Greek prince is too old and settled, and his princedom isn’t big enough.

Ironically, Cora, by choosing to cuckold and then cold-bloodedly murder her husband, not only fails to live the modern American Dream, she becomes a latter-day Classical tragic heroine, following in the footsteps of Clytemnestra, who plotted with her lover Aegistius to kill her husband Agamemnon. Her last year is ultimately very Greek.

Hollywood, in the 1946 movie adaptation starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, whitewashed over race and ethnicity. “Nick Papadakis” became “Nick Smith” (in the book, Cora’s maiden name is Smith) and Nick’s roots were transplanted to northern Canada. Turner, with her bottle-blonde coiffure (Cora is dark-haired in the novel) does not have to explain to anyone that she isn’t Mexican.

Mexico as the land of temptation is marginalized as well. In the opening scene, Garfield as Chambers tells us he ended up in Twin Oaks while hitching from San Francisco to San Diego. In the book, he was coming from “Tia Juana” on a three-week bender.

(Tijuana is more Sin City than Las Vegas. Years ago, the centathlete visited one night with friends. The very first scene past the Border Crossing was a bust of some kind: ten or more locals were lined up against a wall. On nearly every corner, pharmacy signs promoted cheap medications and quick surgeries. Two blocks off the main drag it was dark and foreboding. And then there were the tequila bars.)

The movie focuses on the sex appeal of the doomed couple; with Garfield as the tough homunculus and Turner as the temptress of the diner. Turner looks overly made-up but fabulous in her white wardrobe. Director Tay Garnett explained:

“There was a problem getting a story with that much sex past the sensors. We figured that dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous. It was also attractive as hell… They didn't have ‘hot pants’ back then, but you couldn't tell it by looking at her.”

Garnett and company appear to have also thought about the choice of ties. The chubby Nick Smith wears a conspicuously short tie, which adds to his portrayal as a sexless clown. When Cora catches Frank cheating on her, the proof is the snazzy striped tie he left with the other woman.

While they were glamorous celebrities at the time of filming The Postman Always Rings Twice, Garfield and Turner were in reality not unacquainted with the tribulations of Frank and Cora. Garfield for a time ran with a gang in New York City. Turner, embroiled her whole life in eventful marriages and affairs, participated in a murder trial in 1958 when her 14-year old daughter Cheryl was charged with murdering Turner’s lover, Johnny Stompanato, a gangster’s bodyguard. Cheryl was acquitted on account of self defense.

To write The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain drew on one of the most sensational trials of the 1920’s, the Snyder/Gray case. Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, gripped in a torrid affair, murdered Ruth’s husband, Albert Snyder, an editor of Motor Boating magazine, which even today “covers the passions, adventures and lifestyles of active, affluent boat owners while delivering authoritative reviews and how-to information.”

The lovers blamed each other for the murder, which took place on Long Island, one of the bastions of civilization and, of course, the cradle of the centathlete. David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace summarized some of the trial’s tawdry aspects:

"Although both later claimed the other was the dominant partner, Judd’s nickname of ‘Momma’ or ‘Mommie’ for Ruth would seem to indicate that she was the real leader in their relationship. Ruth wasn't a beauty, but she exuded animal magnetism. During her trial, she received 164 marriage proposals."

It was a circus trial, Troy Taylor writes:

“Celebrities attended in droves, including mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart; director D.W. Griffith; author Will Durant; evangelists Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson.”

Famous journalists such as Damon Runyan and Walter Lippmann attended as well. James M. Cain told The Paris Review that one comment stuck with him: “Walter said it seemed very odd to be inhaling the perfume or being brushed by the dress of a woman he knew was going to be electrocuted.”

Unsurprisingly, a charged olfactory sense appears in The Postman Always Rings Twice. “I could smell her,” Frank tells us when he first encounters Cora. Pheromones are in the air and lust is up his nostrils.

The scent of a woman impressed another noir hero, Marv of the 2005 film Sin City. The killer is smitten with Goldie and says, “She smells like angels ought to smell, the perfect woman…” The tender, prayerful adoration contrasts with the black deeds of an “unstably violent” giant.

Frank Chambers is no comic-book assassin with a heart of gold like Marv. His revelation about smell shows him to be primal and animal-like. What sort of animal?

“You look more like a hell cat,” Frank says to Cora, kicking off the Cat Motif in the story. There’s the dead pussycat at the base of the stepladder. Then, Frank hooks up with Madge Allen, who raises a lion, a tiger, jaguars and pumas, and the two take the road to Ensenada. They discuss tracking pumas in Nicaragua, though it’s never cleared up if they managed to leave their motel room to undertake this expedition.

As a token of their romance, Madge leaves a baby puma for Frank—but gives it to Cora, who hysterically chews out her cheating husband: “And the cat came back! …Ain’t that funny, how unlucky cats are for you?” The image evokes the black cat in The Matrix, a sign of déjà vu that demonstrates a glitch in the system.

Intriguingly, the swaddled feline becomes a surrogate baby for Frank and Cora, albeit for a night only. Frank exhibits no warmth toward a bundle we could presume to be adorable, as this video shows. Parenthood, like marriage, can’t fulfill him.

The National Center for Biomedical Information reports that the puma “occupies the most extensive range of any New World terrestrial mammal.” Astrologists tell us even more:

“…those who share the puma as their totem should be mindful of their tendency [sic] to lash out too quickly, or act out in haste. Call upon the patience and observation of the puma before taking action in order to avoid quick and unsavory consequences.”

If only Frank and Cora had known. Of course, hasty lashing out makes for good noir. Cain himself did not use that label; he thought his narrative was distinctive because it showcased “…the lingo in the mouth of a hobo with good grammar, like they have in California.” He further told The Paris Review: “Let's talk about this so-called style. I don't know what they're talking about—‘tough,’ ‘hard-boiled.’ I tried to write as people talk.”

To us ultramoderns, noir speech doesn’t seem exactly natural—it sounds affectedly measured and menacing, or “razor-sharp and acerbic.” It’s an outdated posture that takes some work to assume. To wit, Mickey Rourke, prepared unusually to become Marv, according to Sin City director Robert Rodriguez:

“Mickey had this one piece of music he would play on the set to get into the character of Marv… It was Johnny Cash’s version of The Nine Inch Nails song, Hurt. If you listen to that song that’s how he did Marv."

(In 1992 Johnny Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame. His presenter was Lyle Lovett.)

For his last stop on the road to Hell or somewhere else, but certainly not Ensenada, Marv gets the electric chair, just as Frank Chambers does in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And just as Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray did in 1928 in Sing Sing. A tabloid reporter snuck in a camera and shot Ruth right when the juice was turned on and, as Marv would say, they “got to it.” If you like noir, you’ll want to see the picture. It’s a doozy. show less

Lana Turner and John Garfield hunger for something more in Tay Garnett’s glossy soap opera noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Based on James M. Cain’s lusty potboiler, Turner is fantastic as the manipulative yet vulnerable Cora Smith, with Garfield matching her as the drifter who can't get Cora or her dreams out of his blood. Turner is like a white creme, icy cold on the surface but burning hot and deep with desire underneath.

Cora is a girl aware of her looks and the effect she has on men. Since she was 14 she’s had to argue with men about it. But she didn't have to argue with Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway), a much older man Cora marries for security, not love. When drifter Frank Chambers (Grafield) shows up to fill the Help show more Wanted sign at the Twin Oaks Diner the mismatched couple run together, Cora discovers she can’t live without love or passion.

Cora is a smouldering vision in white when Frank first sees her, a room full of gas that only needs a single spark to ignite it. Frank knows he can sell anything to anybody and begins to fan the flames when he talks Nick into getting a neon sign for the diner Cora wants the place to be. She tries in her own way to resist what is going to happen between she and Frank, but deep down knows that all the things she married Nick for and clings to are the things she really wants with Frank.

Cora lets him kiss her once then keeps Frank at a distance, working him into a frenzy of desire. A midnight swim seals their fate, the gas now ignited and burning out of control. By the time love is involved, Frank knows nothing can stand in the way of Cora’s dreams.

Garfield is excellent here as a guy who knows he’s signed on for a one way ride to nowhere but can’t help himself. There is a tricky D.A. (Leon Ames) onto them after a botched attempt to live out Cora’s dreams fails. Hume Cronyn is terrific as a crafty defense attorney who throws a monkey wrench into things, but an insurance policy, jealousy, and blackmail gone awry bring them back to the beach, and memories of that swim. Maybe they can even atone for their scenes, unless Fate has other plans…

Turner gives an icy hot performance here, with many long takes between she and Garfield as they are drawn to each other like moths to a flame. Much is made of director Tay Garnett framing Turner in sexy white outfits throughout the film. In her best scene, however, and the one in which she is the most strikingly beautiful, she is dressed in a black bathrobe. She is in the kitchen at the time, caressing a knife and agonizing over her dreams and what needs to be done to make them come true. When Frank walks in on her, her voice catches, her reluctance to follow through real. She tells Garfield in a quivering voice: "If you really loved me…”

Whereas Wilder’s Double Indemnity was a dark noir of twisted passion and greed set in Claifornia, Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice uses the bright sunshine and beaches of Los Angeles County in the 1940s to create a soap opera noir, with the shining blonde Turner and a reluctant drifter Garfield at its center. A good glossy noir. show less

I'll admit it: a collector and a completist by nature, I read this one because it made the Modern Library's list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. I'm not much for crime stories or noirs, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. One hundred years after it was written, it's short, tightly written, and, in its way, sort of shocking.

Most of the shock here comes from the sex. Sex scenes are notoriously difficult to write: they trip up some of the best authors. But the encounters between Frank and Cora -- especially the ones that happen early on -- are unbelievably intense, almost jarring. Cain is also subtle enough to depict Cora as an undeniably attractive woman without forgetting to give her a show more personality and a past. His frankness -- a willingness to show his characters' ugly sides -- extends to other aspects of his characters, too. Cora, a transplant product of the American Midwest -- is an unapologetic racist. Frank, on the other hand, often reads as charming, but has more than his share of personality flaws. A sometime hobo, he's a hedonist and the less respectable kind of free spirit. It's not just that he's a lecher, we also see him consistently resist opportunities to build something permanent, to, in other words, make something of himself. But this is California in the thirties: I'd hazard that Frank's character is meant to stand in the wild parts of the state still untouched by Anglo influence, most of which were about to be buried by an avalanche of development and internal migration. This book's about a lot more than three people in a love triangle who make a lot of disastrous choices.

I found that the problem with "The Postman Always Rings Twice" oddly enough, is that it's almost too good a noir. Or maybe that it has spawned too many imitators. Reading this one is like reading Poe: the prose still shines, but the plots have been redone so many times in so many mediums that it's difficult to be surprised by anything in the plot. I can't be sure, but it feels like this one served as a foundation for much of both film noir and the thriller genre in general. Which doesn't mean that it's prose is any less direct or efficient -- it is certainly both -- but it does mean that many readers are likely to sense the story's pulses well before they've finished reading, and perhaps even predict it's twists. There aren't many noirs or thrillers out there as good as "The Postman Always Rings Twice", but there are a lot of noirs and thrillers out there, and so whatever the novelty the book might have once held for its reader is mostly gone. Even so, even as we come up on its centennial, it's still easy to admire this book's uncompromising honesty and its almost punishing directness. Recommended, even if you're not much of a fan of the genres it helped spawn. show less

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. It is clear from this first sentence that this is something quite different from the typical green Penguin. There is no detective, no clues, no puzzle to solve; this is the story of a murder in depression-era America, told by the murderer. There is no remorse and no justification, he is aware only of his passions and his instinct for self-preservation. He doesn't even dislike the man he kills. This is noir fiction, and it is dark and violent, and yet compelling. Continued

When Cain published this work in 1934 he opened up a new field for writers, and defined a new subgenre .. the hard-boiled noir crime novel.

Frank Chambers is a drifter, who gets tossed off a truck on which he had stowed away, and winds up at the Twin Oaks Tavern. It’s a dusty little “roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California” including a lunch counter, filling station, and a half-dozen “shacks that they called an auto court.” The owner, a Greek named Nick Papadakis, offers him a job, but Frank isn’t interested … at least not until he gets a look at Nick’s wife, Cora.
The passion between Cora and Frank is palpable. And I don’t just mean lust. They fight, slinging horrible words at one another, and are show more even physically brutal. Everything happens at breakneck speed. They coldly plan to murder The Greek, and are “saved” only by a dead cat. The reader gets the sense that despite their professed love, these two are each other’s worst enemy, and one can only keep reading to find out what the final body count will be.

It’s a fascinating story, and rapid-paced. The writing is spare and bold. There isn’t a lot of extraneous description or exposition on motives. Emotions are raw and characters act on them without much thought to consequences. Fans of today’s forensic pathology TV series and books may find this simple. BUT, put yourself back in 1934, and just go along for the ride.

You can read this slim volume in a day or two … but you’ll be thinking about it much longer. show less