The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

Directed by Bob Rafelson. Starring Jack Nicholson, Jessica Lange, John Colicos, Michael Lerner, John P. Ryan, William Traylor, Anjelica Huston. [R]

Second major Hollywood adaptation of James M. Cain’s seamy, steamy crime novel has the right pieces, Depression-era atmosphere to spare, and no shortage of talent on both sides of the screen (including playwright David Mamet making his screenwriting debut), but the coordination and execution is almost entirely ineffectual. Story’s the same—Nicholson’s drifter enters into a torrid affair with the unhappy wife (Lange) of a Greek roadside diner owner (Colicos), they plot to bump the husband off so they can be together, complications and repercussions ensue—but merely being more explicit than the 1946 version doesn’t make the thing rattle and hum. Nothing wrong with Nicholson’s sordid and driven performance, and Lange finally escaped typecasting the year before she’d become a double Oscar-nominee, but we’re only witnessing behavior, not the development of a credible relationship (they fight, they make-up, repeat a half-dozen more times, and who’s to say why). The convolutions of the second-half fallout are more tedious than arresting—talk about a struggle to care what happens to either of the main players—and the efforts to plumb eroticism out of sexual violence falter long before tenderness is later insinuated. Christopher Lloyd appears briefly at the beginning.

48/100