The fate of the “Postman” – Weekend

On May 16, 1943, Luchino Visconti’s debut film Obsession, an adaptation of the novel by American writer James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, premiered in Rome. A few years earlier, it was he who inspired Albert Camus to write the artistic manifesto of existentialism, now, thanks to Visconti, he also found himself at the origins of neorealism. Uliana Volokhova tells how a badass detective story written during the Great Depression turned into an erotic thriller, what French existentialism and Italian neorealism owe to him, and why Tom Wolfe put his author above Hemingway.

Cool detective

A novel about the relationship between handyman Frank and roadside cafe owner Cora, who dreams of getting rid of her husband, was the debut in the literature of 41-year-old James M. Cain. By this point, Kane was an accomplished journalist: he had worked as a crime and union reporter for The Baltimore Sun and The Atlantic, was a staff writer for The American Mercury and The New Yorker, and worked as a screenwriter for Paramount and Columbia Pictures. But it was the novel that brought him fame: “The Postman Always Rings Twice” was released at the beginning of 1934, and by the summer the whole country was already talking about him.

The Postman captivated readers with its action: a love affair, two assassination attempts, mutual betrayal of lovers, their miraculous deliverance from punishment and an unexpected twist of fate in the finale. Critics wrote that Kane’s novel is the pinnacle of the hardboiled detective genre (in Russian it is usually translated as “tough detective”), a crime genre that gained popularity during the years of prohibition, in which the detective opposes both organized crime and a corrupt law enforcement system. There was no hero-detective in Kane’s novel, but all of it rested on the genre’s cynical attitude towards both violence and the law. Or rather, almost all: in the finale, the author suddenly abandoned cynicism, offering the reader both repentance and retribution. The main characters managed to get away with the murder, but fate did justice: Cora died in a car accident, Frank was tried for her murder and sentenced to death. Apparently, the belief that justice still exists, and that justice is possible even in a thoroughly rotten system, turned out to be in demand during the era of the Great Depression – in the first year the novel withstood five circulations.

Existentialist Manifesto

In 1936, the first French translation of the novel was published by Gallimard. Three years later, director Pierre Chenal made the film “The Last Turn” – a free adaptation of the novel in the spirit of poetic realism inherent in French cinema at that time, which exalted representatives of the poor. His Frank and Cora were no longer just passionate lovers who decided to kill in order to be together, but rebels who broke the law in order to achieve happiness in an unjust world. The year after the film’s release, Albert Camus began writing his debut novel, The Outsider, which would become an artistic manifesto for the philosophy of existentialism. In a letter to his friend Pascal, Pia Camus admitted that he was inspired to write a novel about a young Algerian Frenchman who accidentally killed a man and did not feel any remorse, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

There are indeed many similarities in the structure of both novels. First, the mode of narration: both works are monologues of prisoners on death row. Secondly, there is a distinct motive of xenophobia, which is also one of the motives for the murder, and partly its justification in the eyes of the heroes. In The Postman, Cora is annoyed by her husband’s Greek heritage – she does not like his dark hair, and Frank believes that because of him she no longer feels “white”. The lovers call Cora’s husband “Greek” – thereby depersonalizing him and creating the illusion that they are not killing a loved one, but some stranger whose life is worth nothing. In The Outsider, the protagonist kills a random person on the beach and throughout the novel calls him simply “Arab” – depriving him not only of his life, but also of the right to a name. The ending of The Outsider is a direct reference to the ending of The Postman. Kane’s novel ends with Frank awaiting execution: with the help of a prison pastor, he has come to terms with death, hopes for a posthumous reunion with Cora, and asks readers to pray for him. Camus completely reverses this scene: his hero is enraged by the preaching of the priest and is not ready to put up with death – he explains to readers that the world is indifferent, life is absurd and random – and yet he would have lived it again.

The beginning of neorealism

In 1940, leaving occupied France for the United States, director Jean Renoir gave his assistant a typewritten copy of The Postman Rings Twice. The assistant was Luchino Visconti, a young Italian who was just beginning his film career. He liked the novel, he wrote a script based on it and even pawned family jewelry to pay for the shooting. The work went on in an atmosphere of semi-secrecy (under Mussolini’s regime, permission had to be obtained for filming), but the film, called “Obsession”, was released for hire. The audience, however, did not like it at all.

Mussolini’s regime spent a lot of money on creating and maintaining the image of Italy as a country of high culture. Cinema, with its propaganda potential, played an important role here. During the years of Mussolini’s dictatorship, viewers got used to seeing the ideal Italy on the screens – a clean, flourishing country inhabited by honest people loyal to the state and the church. Visconti’s film did not support this image: a poor province appeared on the screen, where drunkenness, promiscuity, obscene jokes and a complete lack of hope reigned. Audiences considered the film the height of obscenity, and in some cities, after it was shown, bishops were invited to cinemas to re-consecrate the theaters desecrated by the Possession, otherwise people refused to cross their threshold in the future.

Unlike the audience, Visconti’s colleagues were delighted. The courage with which he showed “real” life was met with enthusiasm and marked the beginning of a new film language – Italian neorealism. Actually, the very term “neorealism” appeared thanks to “Obsession”. After receiving more boxes of film from the set (including one with a textbook scene in which the main character fell asleep from fatigue over a bowl of soup in a cluttered kitchen), film editor Mario Serandrei wrote to Visconti: “This is something completely new, I am I see it for the first time, and I would call it neorealism.”

exemplary noir

The first American film adaptation of Kane’s novel did not appear until 12 years after the book’s release, in 1946. There had been attempts to adapt the novel for film before, but all of them were stuck in the Hayes code – a set of censorship restrictions that strictly regulated what could and could not be shown on the screen – and remained unrealized. The producers of Metro Goldwyn Mayer were the first to bring the matter to an end: they bought the film rights and did everything to save the plot without violating the provisions of the code. The way out was to make a film in the tradition of film noir, a cinematic genre popular in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s.

The main problem was the intrigue itself: the Hayes code did not encourage the justification of adultery (it could only be shown as something reprehensible) and the seduction of a woman by a man. So the writers turned Cora, an unfortunate woman looking for love in the arms of a handyman, into a noir beauty who manipulates a man and convinces him to kill her husband for the sake of an inheritance. There could not be explicit scenes in the film either, so director Tay Garnett had to go for tricks: Cora did not undress in the frame, but appeared several times in a bathing suit, lovers could not be filmed in the same bed, and a scene appeared in the film in which Cora secretly made her way to Frank’s room to discuss their criminal plan. The motif of hopelessness and inevitability of fate, characteristic of the genre, was reinforced by Frank’s final monologue from the prison cell. He explained to the audience: even if you miss the first call at the door, the postman will still find you and hand you what you are supposed to. The genre adaptation was successful: the film not only grossed $5 million at the box office, but was immediately recognized by critics as an exemplary film noir.

American classic

A bestseller upon release, The Postman Always Rings Twice was quickly recognized as an important American novel. Already in the early 1940s, he was recommended to college students and aspiring writers as a model for concise writing. After the war, however, American literature was taken over by other issues, and The Postman was forgotten.

A new surge in popularity occurred 35 years after its first publication. In the second half of the 1960s, the career of 70-year-old James M. Cain began to decline. He needed money, and the publisher offered to release three of his most famous novels in a collection: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity. The preface to the 1969 collection, laconicly titled Cain X 3, was written by Tom Wolfe, the star of the new journalism, who had just released his famous Electric Cooling Acid Test. He was a sincere admirer of Kane and, in particular, the book The Postman Always Rings Twice, and sent a fiery essay in which he ranked Kane above Ernest Hemingway: “In terms of dynamism, <...> then it is an exceptional feature of the work of Kane himself, since no one else – neither Hemingway, nor even Raymond Chandler – managed to reach his level of skill in this. Kane avoids any breaks in the rhythm of the narrative. On the contrary, everything in his works works to maintain a given rhythm. He writes with equal ease and depth of knowledge about the preparation of simple and quick meals, the investigation of the insurance company, the opera house, etc. – and yet you notice all these scenery at a speed of a good one and a half hundred kilometers per hour. The dynamism of Kane’s storytelling is something!” Wolfe’s recommendation did its job: the first print run sold out in a couple of weeks, the forgotten novel began to be read, studied and taught again.

Erotic thriller

Another important and the last American adaptation of the novel to date came out in 1981. It was directed by Bob Reifelson and starred by Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. In many ways, the film followed the text pretty closely: the Great Depression-era South of the United States, Cora’s distaste for her husband because of his origin, a passionate affair, a sudden denouement, but there was no retribution, no death row and no remorse in the final – it all ended in an accident in which Kora died. The main change, however, was not the lack of an ending, but a distinct emphasis on erotica.

The eroticism of The Postman has been noted before: in some states of the USA and Canada, the text was considered too frank and banned for sale. Tom Wolfe even touched on this aspect of the novel in his preface: “Cora’s swollen nipples became the most famous literary image of the 1930s. They made many people tremble. And yet they are nothing but a literary image. Kane’s secret is that he never uses a single detail, a single scene for nothing. Read another seventy pages, and you will again stumble upon the same nipples. This accurately thought-out image takes place in the novel as a counterpoint: a slight neurophysiological change in their state – and the storyline takes a new unexpected turn. Unlike Wolfe, who appreciated the complexity of the erotic plan of the novel, the producers of the new film did not stand on ceremony and built the entire advertising campaign on eroticism. Posters with scenes from the sex scenes seemed to invite to a porn movie with two Hollywood actors, which ensured the film a box office success, but caused rejection from critics and viewers alike: the once-cool detective story, the text that inspired Camus and Visconti, turned into “a vague erotic thriller with an “outstanding bed scene”.

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