James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice was filmed in 1946 and directed by Tay Garnett for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after a long struggle to produce a script that could be filmed. The novel was considered controversial and erotic in its time. The film has toned down much of the erotic element. Both the novel and the film are set in a California, a California with a diverse but segregated and separated population. The state then was more rural than it is today, with large urban centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and to a lesser degree, San Diego. The setting for this film is not far from Los Angeles--the diner gets its produce from the market in Los Angeles, so the diner would be in the mountains outside the city, along the coast, somewhere in the Santa Monica mountains.

Ethnicity was certainly an important issue in California at that time and was manifested in a number of specific concerns raised by such actions as the Zoot Suit riots in the early 1940s, the internment of the Japanese in World War II, and the continuing influx of immigrants from various parts of the world. Hollywood, however, tended to homogenize its casting so that ethnic differences were minimized except for an accepted group of players who portrayed foreign roles in films requiring this. Ethnic differences emerge most often in family settings--the huge Italian family, or the Mexican family in a Western. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, ethnic differences have been all but eliminated so t

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es who appear in court. Ethnicity is simply not an overt issue. For the most part, the California of this film seems a place without ethnic tensions or even much of an ethnic population. There are certain locales in the film where a more diverse population would be expected to be found--the downtown produce market, the courtroom--but they are simply not there. Nick represented an ethnic element in the novel, but he does not in the film. Keats's investigator has an ethnic look--the part is played by Alan Reed--but his name is Kennedy, if anything an Irish name, though Reed does not look Irish at all. Such uncertain ethnic connections create a universe where ethnicity has no real meaning and may be misleading. The world instead is depicted in different terms, with levels of power among different social classes and with a higher power trumping all else. The actions of this world are depicted on the one hand as arbitrary and on the other as almost predestined. The arbitrary nature of this world is evident in the title. The use of this title in the story suggests a certain arbitrariness to the universe, emphasizing the importance of accident and how that reverses human plans. The image is of the inescapable--the postman ri

Category: Literature - J