THE movie, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” is almost too terrible to walk out of. It is adapted from the James M. Cain novel (which still brings a gleam to most readers’ eyes) and has to do with the mess that a hobo (John Garfield) gets into when he stops at a lunch stand outside of Los Angeles. The mess includes a terror-ridden, blundering love affair with the owner’s wife (Lana Turner), their sloppy murdering of the owner (Cecil Kellaway), their attempts to get acquitted and to get along with each other afterward—the idea being to show how unutterably awful life is in lunch stands and law courts. The story has been laundered, comicalized, slowed down in the filming, and evidently made by a crew of bobby-sox characters; and the result has been to take the anger out of the story and make the lunchroom people so grotesque that their rotten life doesn’t make you feel anything.
The story calls for particularly feverish, dissatisfied people living in an environment that might well drive them to adultery and murder. Garfield, Turner and Kellaway, instead, look as fresh, upper-class and frozen as tulips, wear Saks Fifth Avenue clothes or better—and lots of them: the hobo, for instance, comes off the highway in a sharp, two-toned affair. The lunch stand is large, too sumptuous for highway hamburgers, and has the dummy look of studio houses. The country around it is dappled with dew. The wife spends her time in what should be a jungle washing the several thousand stunning play suits she wears to wait on tables, going for moonlight swims, dancing stylish rhumbas with the hobo. I think the best bobby-sox touches are the white turban that Cora wears to wash dishes, the love scenes which show Cora in a yum-yum pose and outfit, looking like a frozen popsicle, with Frank ogling her at six paces—and probably the director, in the background, swooning over a hamburger.
Some of the scenes, though, are wonderfully grotesque and unintentionally funny—like the first meeting between Frank and Cora, which amounts to a funny take-off on the appearance of the Virgin in “The Song of Bernadette”: in a dramatic silence a lipstick goes trundling down the floor like a trolley car, Frank’s face lights up and there, like a vision in the doorway, is the Lady in a white play suit making up her face. When the two lovers decide to hitch-hike to San Diego, Cora shows up for the journey in an Adrian ensemble, high-heeled shoes and all (Miss Turner, though, does a graphic portrait of a lady being bothered by the heat and the dirt and Garfield looks as if he had been on the road his whole life). Underneath all of the white surfacing of the MGM production (in which the main villain must have been Producer Carey Wilson) is a story about two people having trouble achieving some kind of happy love set-up, beating each other’s brains in at every turn, and this part of the story makes sense a lot of the time. There is never much indication of love between them; from start to finish it is mostly frustration and anger, and as the affair goes on, their hysteria and fear become more and more convincing, and their straining for love becomes relentless and pathetic, almost solid terror.
I don’t think any actress registers the wrong way as constantly as Lana Turner. Since MGM is determined to make a star of her, I wish they would let her go into a movie without the Arabian Nights decoration job, and put her in a part that calls for loyalty, friendliness and lower-middle-class respectability. The things she does best in “The Postman” are ironing, washing the dishes, complaining about someone’s wasting electricity; and what she fails at most completely are the Jean Harlowisms that MGM always gives her—the angry walking, looking disdainful, lipstick-ad kissing.
A lot of Garfield’s work slides too easily because he has played a slouching, quizzical roughneck too often. Also you can’t tell exactly what kind of roughneck he is—soulful, soulless, murderous or not murderous—because by now he is a dull blend of the various shades of tough people he has played in the past. No one, though, has such a store of Dead End Kid mannerisms, and one of the most curious is his suspicion of every conceivable action, even that of a door being opened for him. Cecil Kellaway always strikes me as a monstrous jumble of unrelated bits of business who spends hours on a gesture that shouldn’t take any time at all. He makes an auntie out of the hash-house owner, for some reason. The whole movie is picked up by Hume Cronyn and Leon Ames when they take up the murderers’ case in court. Their part of the movie, which has to do with showing lawyers and courts to be five times as unprincipled as either of the defendants, is a funny culmination to prove that blackness is everywhere, and is marked principally by Cronyn’s beautiful display of calculating crust.
May 20, 1946