Review of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) by Martin D — 25 Apr 2010

Very good movie whit jack nicholson..recomend it...''Next day I was alone with her for a minute, and swung my fist up against her leg so hard it nearly knocked her over. '' 'How do you get that way?' She was snarling like a cougar. I liked her for that. '' 'How are you, Cora?' '' 'Lousy.' ''From then on, I began to smell her again.'' In this passage early in his 1934 novel ''The Postman Always Rings Twice,'' one of the great titles in popular modern American fiction, James M. Cain seems to have perfected that laconic style that begins as Hemingway parody and achieves a classic kind of vulgarity that is erotic, funny and all its own. The characters in Cain are not fancifully third-rate, as they are in Martin Ritt's ''Back Roads.'' They are the genuine article. They snarl like cougars, sometimes just for the hell of it. They don't just put plates on a table - they slam them down. They exchange banalities at a fever pitch.

They also smell. Cora, the slatternly, much younger wife of Nick, the Greek owner of the sleazy roadside diner-gasoline station that is the scene of ''Postman,'' trails a vapor of sexuality that is too strong and intense to be dignified as either a scent or an odor. It's a very particular smell. It drives men mad in the way that, in 19thcentury fiction, the sight of a well-turned ankle might. Cora couldn't exist in this era of deodorants.

Smells are very important in the world of Cain, especially in ''Postman,'' in which the narrator, a drifter named Frank Chambers, finds himself being led by the nose, first into an adulterous affair with Cora, and then into a plot to murder the foul-smelling old Nick, whose Saturday night baths are never enough.

Vulgarity is the essense of Cain's fiction, and vulgarity is what is so lacking in the new screen adaptation directed by Bob Rafelson (''Five Easy Pieces''), written by David Mamet, one of our most talented and idiosyncratic young playwrights, and starring Jack Nicholson as Frank Chambers and Jessica Lange as the portable heater called Cora.

Unlike the romanticized, severely pruned 1946 M-G-M version, in which John Garfield and Lana Turner played the illicit lovers, this ''Postman'' has not been updated. It remains in its own time, the era of the Great Depression when even aimlessness was charged with purpose - the purpose of somehow coping with an economy and with dreams that were falling apart.