I say that one-line statement having yet to read James M. Cain's original (short) book, or the 1946 film starring John Garfield and Lana Turner. So I have now seen the Postman Always Rings Twice directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange twice now, and see it on its own terms without much to really compare it to. Perhaps my perceptions could change once I see the older Hollywood film (even though Luchino Visconti's own version of the book, Ossessione, is one of his masterpieces), but for the moment this is a fairly competent, sometimes exciting, and usually sensual story of lust, murder, thick plots and a few tight twists and turns. Nicholson's Frank Chambers is a sort of blue-collar wanderer who wanders into the life of Cora (Lange, rarely been sexier), who is married to a gregarious, overbearing lug, Papadakis (John Colicos, perfect in a character-actor bit), who with his wife run a little restaurant. Chambers works his way into not just Papadakis's good graces as a worker, but Cora's undergarments as well, so to speak. Soon a plot thickens between the two lovers over what to do with the other. Right out of the best film-noir, there's quite a sequence that spins as their scheme unfolds, which includes money as well as each other. That everything doesn't go quite to plan makes this film both captivating and cool, while sometimes frustrating.
Here Rafelson has his cast really locked in place like it can't go wrong. Nicholson as a street-wise tough guy who falls for a woman with whom there's immediate, sexual magnetism, but also has some flaws that come with the package- almost too easy for him but not a bad performance. Lange brings some dimension to a character that could be either a real prize or a true femme fatale. And character actors like Michael Lerner (only better in Barton Fink) and even featuring Angelica Huston in an early performance, add some good weight to the cast. The sex scenes years later are still enticing, and the ending is a true whopper that is part of the story's best catharsis, though in its own formula still tragic. If then it doesn't feel really as successful as the best noir of the 40s and 50s its almost hard to say. Sometimes scenes kinds of come and go, and the flow of the story sometimes gets jammed up after the midway mark goes by. It turns more into a domestic drama than something more exciting in the suspenseful turns early on. Just when Rafelson has his crew working to put life into some scenes, a few are a little flat in comparison.
Still, even if you have seen the original 40s takes on Cain's novel, it's never less than interesting what goes on thanks to the nature of the story. It's a look at very flawed, psychologically cruxed people who attempt at happiness in ways that change them for worse and for better (possibly more the former). Occasionally the sex could be in danger of veering off the more stylish side of the lust in the 40s noirs into soft-core land, but it's balanced out by its general professionalism and the acting randing from so-so-to-better-than-average. It's a like it or hate it film.
Here Rafelson has his cast really locked in place like it can't go wrong. Nicholson as a street-wise tough guy who falls for a woman with whom there's immediate, sexual magnetism, but also has some flaws that come with the package- almost too easy for him but not a bad performance. Lange brings some dimension to a character that could be either a real prize or a true femme fatale. And character actors like Michael Lerner (only better in Barton Fink) and even featuring Angelica Huston in an early performance, add some good weight to the cast. The sex scenes years later are still enticing, and the ending is a true whopper that is part of the story's best catharsis, though in its own formula still tragic. If then it doesn't feel really as successful as the best noir of the 40s and 50s its almost hard to say. Sometimes scenes kinds of come and go, and the flow of the story sometimes gets jammed up after the midway mark goes by. It turns more into a domestic drama than something more exciting in the suspenseful turns early on. Just when Rafelson has his crew working to put life into some scenes, a few are a little flat in comparison.
Still, even if you have seen the original 40s takes on Cain's novel, it's never less than interesting what goes on thanks to the nature of the story. It's a look at very flawed, psychologically cruxed people who attempt at happiness in ways that change them for worse and for better (possibly more the former). Occasionally the sex could be in danger of veering off the more stylish side of the lust in the 40s noirs into soft-core land, but it's balanced out by its general professionalism and the acting randing from so-so-to-better-than-average. It's a like it or hate it film.