I don’t know what it is about mystery writer James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice that makes it so worthy of so many adaptations. Perhaps it’s the innuendo laden title, viciously poetic, that catches our eyes and imaginations. Cain was responsible for writing the novels in which three of the best damn 1940’s film noirs were based on: Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945); Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), and of course, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by the relatively unknown Tay Garnett. Perhaps it’s auteur theory at work---Curtiz and Wilders were masters of the silver screen, and to rehash what’s already considered perfect can be taboo. Maybe it’s the fact that Postman was first filmed by Italian maestro, Luchino Visconti as Ossessione (1943).
Concerning a married woman in an un-pleasant marriage who falls in love with a dodgy drifter, while they pair up to murder her floppy husband, the original US version stars Lana Turner and John Garfield as the passionate infidels. Turner famously wears only white, meant as a stark contrast to her murderous intentions. Due to the bloody Hays code, adapting Cain’s highly sexualized material into a tame film delayed the adapting of the novel (which apparently took 12 years on US soil). The film is often noted for the sweltering sexual tension between Turner and Garfield, with Turner especially oozing sensuality, and was famously remade by Bob Rafelson in 1981 with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, respectively. As you can imagine, the sex sequences are much more intense, including a now infamous kitchen sink scene. Depending on your preference, the resulting sexiness of the two films is up for debate. Nevertheless, the 1981 film shot Jessica Lange into super stardom in the 1980’s, her career finally recovering from the reaction critics had to the film in which she made her debut, the first King Kong (1976) remake.
And now the Germans have their say. Christian Petzold, director of the gorgeous and intriguing thriller Yella (2007) returns with Jerichow (2008), a sort of re-vamp of Postman, named after a poor economic region of East Germany. Petzold (let’s keep our fingers crossed) could be the second coming of Fassbinder, complete with muse in tow, as German beauty Nina Hoss scores the lead in a great deal of his work. Known for slowly building foreboding into a crescendo of tension, Petzold’s work should appeal to anyone enjoying Michael Haneke (though Petzold’s work may be a bit more accessible). In both Yella and Jerichow he takes the devastatingly gorgeous Hoss and crafts her into different facets of desperation, a victim of her surroundings and her gender. Petzold has modernized the story effectively with the femme fatale Postman role. The most unbelievable parts of both US films were Turner/Lange’s relationship to their married husbands (Cecil Kellaway and John Colicos)---and their subsequent attractions to male drifters John Garfield and Jack Nicholson. Now, I don’t know about you, but Nicholson especially was never close to being magnetically scintillating in any kind of sexual sense, even in his younger old days in the 70’s and 80’s (like Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon swooning over him in The Witches of Eastwick, 1988—yeah, right). I never found Garfield to be charismatic, either (much the same way I felt Robert Mitchum was as a male lead---icky). Petzold casts Benno Furmann, a very Aryan/Nordic, well-built actor, who portrays the drifter as rather intelligent and with dark secrets of his own (such as being dishonorably discharged from the military while serving in Afghanistan). Hilmi Sozer stars as the husband, played sympathetically by the dumpy but not horrifically unattractive actor that Ebert compared to a Greek looking Bob Hoskins. The reason he snagged a looker like Hoss as a wife was because he paid off her incredible amount of debt (something she accumulated after a mysterious stint in prison) and a prenuptial agreement states that if she were to leave her husband, she would inherit back her debt. Ere goes, the solution is murder. Hoss portrays her character, Laura, manipulatively. It’s easy to see she’s sexually attracted to Furmann, but after sleeping together, he says he’s in love, while she tells him there’s only one way to break the tie that binds. Whereas the other Postman treatments delve into the aftermath of murder, Jerichow leaves the beaten path, intriguingly twisting the plot and invariably expanding the depth of the characters. None of them are particularly good people, but neither are they particularly bad---they all have feelings. Petzold is a force to watch out for, and while I still prefer Yella, his new film is an excellent force to seek out, expanding on foreboding and paranoia in isolated pockets of East Germany, with beautiful, desperate women and abusive men amidst the backdrop of gorgeous cinematography in the countryside.
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