Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Double Indemnity started the trend toward the production of fast-paced, hardboiled,
life-like pictures (…). (in Shearer 1945:11)
Still on the subject of style, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is said to have
inspired Albert Camus’ existential novel The Outsider. The 1934 novel was a success upon
its publication, mostly thanks to the fact that Cain knew how to reach the primary impulses
of greed and sex, using protagonists who were led to crime through animalistic passion,
pared down to crucial phrases with clipped, almost vicious simplicity. John Garfield plays
the role of a drifter, Frank Chambers, who arrives at a small California roadside café and
feels a strong attraction to Cora Smith (Lana Turner), an eye-catching young woman,
married to the middle-aged owner of the restaurant, Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway).
The prose in The Postman Always Rings Twice novel is incredibly fast, from the
moment Frank sets eyes on Cora, working perhaps even faster than narrative in the movie
itself. As Jessica Morrell points out, “the speed of the scene, aided by pared-down
language and spare details, also makes the reader tense” (Morrell 2006:248), thus
contributing to an uncomfortable situation:
Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up
my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a
sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them
in for her. (Cain 1989c:8)
In a matter of a few pages, the dialogue becomes terse, hard-boiled, to the point that
when their relationship erupts with Cora’s sexual advances, when she implores him to
“Bite me! Bite me!”, the text reads:
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my
mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs. (Cain 1989c:11)
The film does not project this type of dialogue, and certainly not scenes of such
content (for censorship reasons). I refer the reader to Appendix II “The Motion Picture
Production Code”, where on page 472, it reads: “Scenes of passion must be treated with an
honest acknowledgement of human nature and its normal reactions”. The untamed nature
of the sex in The Postman was indeed considered too contentious, and Cain’s strength in
depicting the characters’ basic impulses had to be “contained” in the film version. The
expression used by Frank in the novel, “she really wasn’t any raving beauty”, was
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