Dotsthavesp
I wanted to but couldn't!
UnowPriceless
hyped garbage
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
frankwiener
Spoilers ahead! I admit that I don't understand the title. As much as I tried and tried, I finally gave up. I do understand that Frank (John Garfield) and Cora (Lana Turner) attempted to commit one crime and succeeded at another without being convicted but then ironically "paid" for their crimes unexpectedly and accidentally, but what does that have to do with a postman ringing twice? My postman doesn't even ring once, and almost everything that he delivers is junk mail that gets immediately recycled before I open it. Maybe the original title "Bar BQ" should have stuck. Who knows?Aside from what I have read about the personal relationship between the two leads, which was confusing by itself, I didn't think that they were very good. I didn't believe that Garfield was emotionally involved in his part, and, sorry folks, I never appreciated Lana Turner as an actor. What was her speech affectation all about? Did you catch that? She sounded as if she had just arrived on the set from major dental surgery, and I found it very irritating. I'm glad that novelist James Cain believed that she was the perfect Cora. In an odd way, perhaps he is right because I didn't like the character that she played either.Although the film interested me at the beginning, my involvement faded fast. Cora's relationship with Nick (Cecil Kellaway) was totally unrealistic to me, and Nick's character completely annoyed me. Much of the time, I felt that I was watching a parody or a spoof of an actual drama because so many of the lines seemed so ridiculous to me. I believed that the cast felt that they were as ludicrous as I found them and delivered them accordingly with very little effort or interest. All of a sudden, out of the blue, Nick announces that he and Cora are departing for the wilds of northern Canada to care for his long lost sister. Can you picture Cora settling permanently not just in Regina or Saskatoon but in northern Sasketchewan? I could tell immediately that everyone was in trouble from that moment forward. The stage was set!I like Leon Ames alright, but if he said "laddy" just one more time I was going to smash my pc to the ceramic floor into a thousand pieces. Somehow, I managed to control myself in the "nick" of time. It just wouldn't have been worth the loss.
bubblelad
The only part of the movie I enjoyed at all was the Nick Smith character played by Cecil Kellaway. The plot was boring. The characters Frank Chambers and Cora Smith were boring. I kept checking the clock, hoping that the movie was almost over.
Mr_Ectoplasma
This film noir has Lana Turner as Cora, the naive wife of a much older roadside café owner, clashing with Frank, a drifter, played by John Garfield, who rolls into town and gets a job at the diner. The two begin a flaming romance and eventually plot the murder of Cora's husband, with insurmountable ramifications.Although not perhaps the most realistic or gritty noir, "The Postman Always Rings Twice" is memorable for two reasons: first, because it was perhaps the first instance in which MGM sweater girl Lana Turner was truly able to cut her teeth; and second, its atmosphere is explosively provocative and quietly dazzling.Shadowy and slow burning, the film moves between worlds as Cora and Frank become a singular threat to Nick, and their fate unravels and splinters into a dramatic finale. Based on the book by James N. Cain (who also wrote "Double Indemnity"), "The Postman Always Rings Twice" is less talkier than a lot of noir, but constructs a languid atmosphere and is rife with dramatic (if not always entirely believable) characters. Turner lights up the screen as perhaps the most glamorous waitress of all time, and John Garfield has a great chemistry with her on screen. Moody cinematography bolstered with closeups and subtle stylistic touches accentuate the general mood of the picture.Overall, this is a fantastic noir, but it's not Mickey Spillane or anything of the like; it's a bit more leisurely and the stakes don't feel as grave as they do in other noir of the era, but the performances and dreary atmosphere that lurks in every scene make this worth the while. Lana Turner's vixenish take as the naive-turned-evil waitress is worth the price of admission alone. I'd describe the film as a weird collision of major studio gloss with the gritty tropes of noir, which, while some people may not find it that appealing, I personally enjoyed the dichotomy. 8/10.
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . according to the California state police in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. You see, the cat doesn't ring at all, because it's just a cat, and cat's don't ring. It just slinks around, electrocuting people. If ladders and cats are bad luck separately, this Film Noir effort shows that they're double trouble together. Since there is no disclaimer at the end of POSTMAN about "no animals being harmed during the making of this movie," viewers can only assume that the doomed feline shown in full rigor "the morning after" is not just "faking it" by "playing dead." Its late night death screech during the previous scene sounded real (rather than the result of "vocal coaching"), and I still can't forget than Hollywood allowed Thomasina to be buried alive (not to mention what happened to the little daughter's kitty in I REMEMBER MAMA). Some say cats have nine lives. However, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, the Shaggy Dog and their canine cohorts seem to put out 10 "arfs" on the big screen for each "meow" heard there. Blofeld strokes his Fluffy White Pu$$y Cat as the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E., just the foremost in a long line of screen villains to favor the nefarious feline over "Man's best friend." The POSTMAN killers are merely one more entry to a very long list.
