In March 1927 Long Island housewife Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, joined together to murder Snyder's husband, Albert, for the insurance money. Both were caught, tried, convicted, and swiftly executed. A notorious case, the Snyder-Gray affair became pop culture legend when Thomas Howard, a New York 'Daily News' photographer, surreptitiously photographed Snyder's death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. Published in the 'Daily News' on Jan. 12, 1928, the photo caused such a sensation that the newspaper had to print an additional 750,000 copies. Six years later James M. Cain's novel, 'The Postman Always Rings Twice', fictionalized the Snyder-Gray case to critical and popular acclaim. In 1946 Cain's book was brought to the screen by M-G-M with John Garfield as Frank Chambers (Judd Gray's counterpart), the glamorous Lana Turner as Cora Smith (the Ruth Snyder figure), and Cecil Kellaway as Nick Smith (based on victim Albert Snyder). In Cain's novel, Nick is Nick Papadakis, a swarthy, rather venal Greek greasy spoon proprietor. Interestingly the 1946 film version softens Nick's personality and elides his Mediterranean ethnicity but retains the fact that he is considerably older than his wife (at the time of filming Turner was 25 and Kelloway was 52). Bob Rafelson's remake, written by playwright/screenwriter David Mamet, is a more faithful adaptation of Cain's novel and—15 years after the collapse of the Hays Code—is also vastly more sexually explicit. In Rafelson's version Jack Nicholson is cast as dissolute drifter Frank Chambers, Jessica Lange is the bored, oversexed wife, Cora Papadakis, John Colicos plays Nick (restored to his full, greasy ethnic unattractiveness), and Angelica Huston appears (gratuitously) as Madge, a circus tamer of big cats who has a fling with Frank. With solid acting, sure direction by Rafelson, superb production design by George Jenkins ('The Parallax View'; 'All the President's Men'), and outstanding cinematography by Ingmar Bergman stalwart Sven Nykvist, the 1981 version of 'Postman' should have been a neo-noir classic. Unfortunately something fails to click—most probably the chemistry between Nicholson and Lange, which depends too much on simulated high-octane animal attraction and not enough on real simpatico. While quite good, Rafelson's version is strangely flat and uninvolving; we end up not caring very much what happens to Frank and Cora. VHS (1993); DVD (1997).
Review of The Postman Always Rings Twice
