The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is a film noir drama film based on the 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice novel by James M. Cain. This adaptation of the novel is the best known, featuring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn, Leon Ames, and Audrey Totter. It was directed by Tay Garnett, with a score written by George Bassman and Erich Zeisl (the latter uncredited).

Frank Chambers (John Garfield) is a drifter who stops at a rural diner for a meal, and ends up working there. The diner is operated by a beautiful young woman, Cora Smith (Lana Turner), and her much older husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway).

Frank and Cora soon have an affair after they meet. Cora is tired of her situation, married to a man she does not love, and working at a diner that she wishes to own. She and Frank scheme to murder Nick in order to start a new life together without her losing the diner. Their first attempt at the murder is a failure, but they eventually succeed.

Critic Stephen MacMillan Moser appreciated Lana Turner's the acting and wrote, "It is perhaps her finest work -- from a body of work that includes very few truly stellar performances. She was a star, and not necessarily an actress, and because of that, so much of her work does not stand the test of time. She is best remembered for the spate of films like Peyton Place and Madame X that traded on her personal tragedies, but Postman, which predates all that, is a stunner -- a cruel and desperate and gritty James Cain vehicle that sorely tests Lana's skills. But she succeeds marvelously, and from the first glimpse of her standing in the doorway in her white fuck-me pumps, as the camera travels up her tanned legs, she becomes a character so enticingly beautiful and insidiously evil that the audience is riveted."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_%281946_film%29


A staple of Film Noir, it's narrative centers around the moral ambiguity of the human condition and consciousness. Very powerful performances from Lana Turner and John Garfield, but I've heard it said more than once that Turner wished they would have cast her alongside someone more "good looking." She didn't particularly care for Garfield, who was somewhat of a bad-boy in Classic Hollywood. He was caught up in the Communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of political beliefs.