Postman Always Research Articles

Remaking the Crisis of Masculinity in Hollywood Neo-Noir: The Postman Always Rings Twice and Body Hea

Remaking the Crisis of Masculinity in Hollywood Neo-Noir: The Postman Always Rings Twice and Body Hea

Homicides as an Immoral Self-Proclamation in James M. Cain’s Crime Fiction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the motives and elements of homicides within a capitalist background in James M. Cain’s hardboiled crime fiction, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, while exploring their connection to existential issue, identity crisis, and modern melancholia. The reading observes capitalism as a fateful companion aligned with members of society, sharing in the sense of melancholic dreams and emotions within the experiences of passion and depression, rather than investigating or accusing its intrinsic problems. And it focuses on how the human instinct of not wanting to become normal and inferior to other presences is more bluntly spurred in the crisis of permeated identities. In the process, the complex interplay of personal issues within an individual’s private realm work to unfold violent and immoral actions of homicides in the name of safeguarding or asserting personal territories—immoral self-proclamation—amidst gender, class, and wealth conflict. Through Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity dealing with criminal behaviors, struggles, and deficiencies underlying certain patterns, this paper explores the complex human mind and the criminality of combative human history from psychological and philosophical perspectives. In this manner, the paper prioritizes the exploration of universality over conflict issue and suggests a different approach to consuming crime fiction in humanistic way.

Compromised Men and Aspiring Women: The Fatality of Romance in James M. Cain’s Depression-Era Novels

James M. Cain’s depiction of changing gender roles in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941), classics of literary noir, explores the fatality of sentimentalized romance in relation to the Great Depression’s erosion of the American Dream. Serenade (1937) is a puzzling deviation from this theme. Despite criticism of the “iron-hard pattern of necessity” that underlies his work, Cain’s early fiction illuminates the nation’s cultural legacy.

Not a Lost Generation: James M. Cain, Al Dubin, and the Doughboy's Voice in Popular Culture between the Wars

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellersThe Postman Always Rings TwiceandDouble Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.

Slow burn: James M. Cain, slow cinema and György Fehér’s Szenvedély

Abstract Few novels have proven as alluring to filmmakers as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which since its publication in 1934 has been adapted to the screen seven times in six different countries. This article focuses on one such adaptation – a film that has to date received little critical attention: György Fehér’s Szenvedély (or Passion) from 1998. More precisely, it positions Szenvedély as a work of ‘slow cinema’, arguing that Fehér’s film draws heavily on the aesthetic practices of this emergent genre in its creative engagement with Cain’s story of lust and murder, its engagement with the affective economy generated by Cain’s text, and the intensities this fosters. With an emphasis on affect and lived time over narrative momentum and causality, Szenvedély’s affords viewers a temporally engrossing, viscerally arresting cinematic experience that – in its own distinctive, insinuative manner – is downright Cainsian in its power to move and shock.

Borders and Crossings

Borders and Crossings Douglas Silver (bio) The switchboard lamps flash to life every hour on the hour, coinciding with the radio newscast. Americans are calling to speak to President Truman, to Vice President Barkley, to Secretary of War Patterson. Instead they get Operator #9, Genevieve Higgins, who answers with a sprightly "White House, how may I direct your call?" and then incurs a litany of grievances. They are angry about rocketing inflation, about Soviet rockets, the price of eggs, the cost of war. A man from Biloxi fumes over a Negro baseball player debuting for the Brooklyn Dodgers' farm team in Montreal. One surly woman, convinced The Postman Always Rings Twice harbingers a Communist invasion, is aghast when Genevieve tactfully declines to patch her through to the leader of the free world. "Next time you see Harry Truman," she says, "tell him Betsy Mare from Knoxville thinks he's just rotten." The woman's outrage is comical, much like her delusion that Genevieve and the president are acquaintances, that perhaps the message will be relayed during lunch-hour chitchat or hallway pleasantries. The dirty truth about the White House operators is that they don't work in the White House. They—Genevieve and eight other women, all her senior in both age and rank—are installed next door, seated at a wall-length console in an otherwise cramped subbasement of the Executive Office Building. This remove from the Oval Office has in no way discouraged her mother from crowing to the housewives at church group—specifically those whose sons are single and gainfully employed—embellishing her daughter's function of screening calls and plugging jacks to an appointment behooving Senate confirmation. One such housewife, a Mrs. Coleman, new to the church, takes the bait. Her son is a police officer. Prior to that, he was an Army private first class who assailed the beaches of Normandy. His name is Walter and, Genevieve's mother informs her, he will pick her up on Saturday evening. ________ Walter Coleman is husky, with an overbite like a ship's prow and, fittingly, a sodden voice that gurgles as if a lozenge were perpetually dissolving on his tongue. He opens the car door for her, the soda fountain door, waits for her to sit first, insists on paying for their ice cream before she has the chance to offer. His manners are mannered, as if he were adhering to a primer on dating etiquette. To Genevieve's amazement, she finds this endearing. Less so that he prefaces most statements with My mother told me . . . : "My mother told me you [End Page 68] sing like Billie Holiday"; "My mother told me you have a secret recipe for the best apple cobbler in the world"; "My mother told me you talk to the president all the time." Of course, Genevieve doesn't know Walter's mother from a sack of potatoes. He is merely reiterating the extravagant biography her mother fed his mother, an approach Genevieve reciprocates, their conversation more like decryption, translating the puffery of their mothers into the brass tacks of each other. As such, Genevieve clarifies that she sings along to Billie Holiday, that the secret behind her apple cobbler is that she lifted the recipe from a Betty Crocker cookbook, that only Mrs. Burston (Operator #1) and Mrs. Reynolds (Operator #2) deal directly with the president. None of this deters him. He, too, likes Billie Holiday. He, too, likes Betty Crocker. He voted for Harry Truman but hoped the president would've accomplished more by now. "I'll pass along your disappointment," she says. "No need. I haven't given up on him yet." Genevieve isn't sure if he is mirroring her sarcasm or oblivious to it. Either way, she is grateful when Walter slurps the last fudgy puddle of his sundae and they reverse course to her house. He escorts her to the door. In the dark his features seem less pronounced, the shadow chiseling his jawline. She thanks him for the wonderful night. "Maybe next time we'll go to a movie," he says. "My mother told me you have a real thing for Cary Grant." "He's...

Image, Word and Echo: Voice-over Narration in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Focusing on asynchronous sound and its relation to cinematic image, this article explores the role of disembodied narration. Traditionally regarded as a faulty by-product of narrative fiction, voice-over has recently come into focus as a transgressive and quintessentially cinematic device that traverses genres, borrows from different media and challenges distinctions between image, sound and word. Taking on an adaptation perspective, the article demonstrates how the echo effect is key to both writing and filming activity, and the dead hero a distinctively noir type of posthumous narrator. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946) was the first Hollywood adaptation of Cain’s novel, marketed as its most accurate rendition. Starring John Garfield, the film capitalizes on the main actor’s plaintive voice and unpolished American diction to seduce the audience into ‘the hallucination of a fully sensory world’ (Doane). In contrast to the novel’s first-person narrator who manipulates the reader into complete surrender, the voice-over in Garnett’s movie promises intimacy and finally steals it away by exposing the artifice of cinema. Drawing on Chion’s definition of cinema as a “verbocentric” phenomenon, and Pasolini’s intuition that image and word in film are a “bi-unity”, this article argues for the phantasmatic and potentially subversive quality of voice-over narration in Garnett’s drama.

“The Postman Always Rings Twice”: Evaluating E-Learning Platform a Decade Later

E-Learning represents an effective answer to the continuous request for life-long learning. In fact, this approach allows the flexibility and quality requested by such a kind of learning process. In this scenario, a great number of E-Learning platforms have been introduced on the market and their selection is not a trivial task: various features should be taken into account during the evaluation of an E-Learning platform. Obviously, the analysis of the technical features of an E-Learning platform is not enough: it is also important to understand how it can be integrated in the didactic context in order to facilitate learning and training and what principles are applied to guide the way the system is used. A decade ago, the authors of this paper introduced a model for describing and characterizing on-line learning platform components. Today, the aim of this paper is to evaluate and upgrade this model. During this period, many things have changed in the Web (the introduction of social networks, new multimedia protocols, etc.): what has changed in the E-Learning platforms? Today how to evaluate the E-Learning platforms? In this paper the evaluation model will be updated and then used to evaluate the most known existing platforms.

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy Stephen Schryer (bio) Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams by Anna Siomopoulos. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 166. $125.00 cloth. In her insightful new book Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal, Anna Siomopoulos explores how 1930s and 1940s US popular cinema mediates popular anxieties about the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the New Deal. Deftly moving between readings of Gabriel over the White House (1933), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Fury (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Emperor Jones (1933), Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Killers (1946) and expositions of welfare-state theory by 1930s intellectuals and public figures, her work offers a compelling and precisely contextualized account of how state policies shape cultural productions and vice versa. At the book’s heart is Siomopoulos’s careful delineation of a homology between New Deal presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema. On the one hand, much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s popularity rested on his use of melodrama to generate sympathy for the Great Depression’s victims and support for New Deal programs. This rhetoric helped “offset the advanced rationalization of new government bureaucracy and . . . justify the encroachment of the state into the private lives of U.S. citizens” (2). On the other hand, Depression-era films gave expression to public fears and fantasies about FDR’s policies; their melodramatic conclusions, [End Page 683] however, ultimately endorsed New Deal ideology. In particular, both FDR and 1930s and 1940s cinema used melodrama to affirm a conventionally liberal individualism in ways that helped undermine public support for more radically redistributive social policies. In developing this argument, Siomopoulos enters into a long-standing debate about the ideology of melodrama. For Lewis Mumford and other mass-culture critics of the 1930s, melodrama was a conservative form that reinforced existing social hierarchies. In the past forty years, beginning with the work of Peter Brooks, critics have challenged this assessment. Brooks highlighted melodrama’s origins in the French Revolution, describing it as a potentially revolutionary genre; more recently, critics like Linda Williams have argued that melodrama plays a crucial role in establishing sympathy for marginal social groups. Siomopoulos’s position more closely approximates Mumford’s than Brooks’s or Williams’s. Drawing her subtitle (“public daydreams”) from Mumford’s work, she argues that “Hollywood melodramas of the ’30s and ’40s maintained their resemblance to private daydreams— individual fantasies with no public valence—at the same time that the melodramatic conventions of these films consistently supported New Deal public policy” (4). For her, the politics of sympathy that Williams discovers in Hollywood melodrama is precisely the problem with these films; both presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema draw on the language of sympathy in order to perpetuate individualistic solutions to economic crisis. Both FDR and Hollywood melodrama focus on “private individuals rather than public movements and on private solutions to public problems” (5). In criticizing this politics of sympathy, Siomopoulos draws on Hannah Arendt; compassion, she complains, “is not a critical or rational enough emotion upon which to base social justice because it responds to suffering with simple, self-evident solutions” (66–67). Sympathy promotes individual acts of charity rather than systemic social change. Unlike Mumford, however, Siomopoulos carefully highlights the ideological contradictions that run through her chosen films. Her readings all follow a similar pattern; she shows how the films mediate Depression-era dissatisfaction with the New Deal but then affirm New Deal policies in their final, melodramatic scenes. Gabriel over the White House, for instance, released shortly after FDR’s first inauguration, registers public fears that FDR would expand the powers of the presidency for corrupt personal gain. The film draws a series of analogies between an ineffective president (Judd Hammond, played by Walter Huston) and [End Page 684] his archnemesis, a mafia crime boss; both are equally ruthless and equally dedicated to private consumption. However, after a Road-to-Damascus-style conversion, President Hammond learns to channel his gangster-like energies toward the public interest, morphing into a benevolent dictator who increasingly resembles FDR. Interestingly, Siomopoulos suggests that this filmic tension between critique and affirmation of New Deal ideology...

Censoring and Selling Film Noir

Film noir is known for its duplicity. Industry censors considered 1940s noir cinema provocative, salacious and ‘sordid.’ Hollywood studios walked a fine line between appearing to comply with Hays office Production Code censorship while simultaneously pushing the envelope of its moral constraints, then hyping and sensationalizing censorable sex, violence and hard-hitting themes to sell noir films to the public. In fact, studios capitalized on the racy explicit nature of noir pictures in publicity contradicting assurances of censorial compliance. For instance, censor Joseph Breen was “shocked” when MGM purchased James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. It was banned for a decade. Yet, ten years later as filmmakers adapted hardboiled fiction, Breen assured religious groups it would “not be offensive.” Yet, it was promoted as “torrid,” “too hot to handle” with Lana Turner in a bathing suit finding “Love at Laguna Beach” with hunky John Garfield who clamored, “You must be a she-devil,” suggesting far more sex, skin and “savage boldness” than is shown in the film. Film noir responded to Production Code censorship and other regulatory factors, including Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures restrictions on Hollywood screen depictions of the domestic American home front (or overseas combat front), and Office of Censorship strictures such as a wartime ban on screen gangsters as ‘un-American’ for propaganda purposes in World War II-era noir films centering on criminals. These multiple censorship entities often collided. This regulatory climate catalyzed the development of film noir, a dark cycle of shadowy 1940s-50s crime films that boomed by World War II and evolved over the postwar era. I will investigate extensive primary archival research—including scripts, memos from industry censors, writers, directors, producers, and publicity records—to compare how film noir was censored and sold.

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Resisting Homogenization: Giorgio Bassani translates James M. Cain

First published in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain caused an immediate sensation in the U.S., and its fame soon spread across the ocean into Europe. This paper examines the first unabridged Italian translation by Giorgio Bassani (1946). Starting from Venuti’s objection to the “simpatico” notion, according to which a congeniality between author and translator would guarantee a successful translation, the author pushes his argument further and suggest that antipathy, or a contrariety of feeling can challenge the tradition of transparent discourse and approximate Lewis’s idea of “abusive fidelity.” Through an analysis of Bassani’s translation, the article discusses how the Jewish-Ferrarese writer tampered with standard Italian usage by switching past tenses, by using a mixed language, and by ultimately surrendering to the untranslatability of Cain’s prose. In conclusion, Rita Filanti argues that Bassani’s refusal to appropriate and domesticate the foreign text can be read as a celebration of Italy’s liberation from fascism and its enforced policy of language normalization.

"Let Me Put It This Way: It Works for Me": An Interview with Bob Rafelson

almost fifty years since he made his first imprint on American popular culture by coproducing The Monkees television show (1966-68), Bob Rafelson is still a hallmark name in the hallways of higher-education film production and theory programs. Those of us who started going to the movies in the late 1960s and early 70s know BBS-the production house of Bert Schneider,1 Bob Rafelson, and Stephen Blauner-as the birthplace of Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The Last Picture Show (1971). BBS became synonymous with the development of American independent cinema during that time period.Bob Rafelson, one-third of BBS, was born in New York City on February 21, 1933. Rafelson's film career began with the idea of a television show, which would eventually become The Monkees. Although he had this idea years before the concept was turned into the television show, he had to wait for the Beatles to become a worldwide phenomenon for his idea of a television show based on a boy band to be taken seriously by studios. The Monkees won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1967 for its first season. This early success opened many doors to Rafelson.He was able to securely explore writing and directing, given that he was also the producer of the show and made the decisions on which crew to hire and fire. Thus, he wrote and directed various episodes of the show and eventually produced, wrote, and directed a feature film about the band, Head (1968). This film is a blend of genres and is structured as a series of vignettes, which Rafelson explains by pointing out that he did not know whether he would ever get the chance to direct a second film. He sought to explore all that he wanted to do as a director in case he did not get another chance.But he received many more chances, building an impressive resume that includes directing ten feature films, five of which he also produced. Other credits include editing, acting, and writing. His 1970 film Five Easy Pieces garnered him two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay and two Golden Globe nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay. He won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director for the film. Rafelson's career started in a very promising and successful way, if measured by high-profile award nominations and the Emmy win. From this viewpoint, Rafelson could never again connect with his early success.His films, however, show the evolving signature of a great director who uses music and locations as key motifs in his films. The television show was centered on a band that traveled; Five Easy Pieces follows Robert, who travels from the oil rigs to a wealthier side of America; No Good Deed (2002) is a journey piece that centers on reevaluation of one's life at a key moment in time, with characters trying to leave one location and reach another, with musical instruments playing a key role in characters' lives. Man Trouble (1992) opens up to an orchestral rehearsal, with a star opera singer for a protagonist. Music is such an important component to Rafelson's work process that he signs a composer to a movie as soon as he is committed to the picture. His favorite composer-and collaborator on four films-was the late Michael Small (1939-2003).2Another important signature of Rafelson's work is his ability to find new talent, introducing the public to new actors. At the start of his career, he introduced audiences to Jack Nicholson. The two first worked as cowriters for Head (1968), and two years later Nicholson became the lead in Five Easy Pieces. The two continued to collaborate over the years, working together on seven productions. Along the way, Rafelson continued to discover new talent or assist rising stars to shine in his films, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (Stay Hungry [1976]); Sally Field (Stay Hungry), who at that time had many television credits but only one film to her name; Jessica Lange (The Postman Always Rings Twice [1981]), with only three film credits to her name back then; and Jennifer Lopez (Blood & Wine [1996]). …

When stories travel: cross-cultural encounters between fiction and film

Adapting fiction into film is, as author Cristina Della Coletta asserts, a transformative encounter that takes place not just across media but across different cultures. In this book, Della Coletta explores what it means when the translation of fiction into film involves writers, directors, and audiences who belong to national, historical, and cultural formations different from that of the adapted work. In particular, Della Coletta examines narratives and films belonging to Italian, North American, French, and Argentine cultures. These include Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Federico Fellini's version of Edgar Allan Poe's story Never Bet the Devil Your Head, Alain Corneau's film based on Antonio Tabucchi's Notturno indiano, and Bernardo Bertolucci's take on Jorge Luis Borges' Tema del traidor y del heroe. In her framework for analyzing these cross-cultural film adaptations, Della Coletta borrows from the philosophical of Hans-Georg Gadamer and calls for a hermeneutics of estrangement, a practice of mediation and adaptation that defines cultures, nations, selfhoods, and their aesthetic achievements in terms of their transformative encounters. Stories travel to unexpected and interesting places when adapted into film by people of diverse cultures. While the intended meaning of the author may not be perfectly reproduced, it still holds, Della Coletta argues, an equally valid and important intellectual claim upon its interpreters. With a firm grasp on the latest developments in adaptation theory, Della Coletta invites scholars of media studies, cultural history, comparative literature, and adaptation studies to deepen their understanding of this critical encounter between texts, writers, readers, and cultural movements.

So Who Has Time to Read? Mediterranean Blue-Collar Noir, Part 2

N oir is, first of all, a style. In film it manifests itself in the dark shadows, odd visual angles, and extreme contrasts similar to those of German expressionist film. In fact, the argument has been made that American film noir was at least partially, if not largely, the result of the presence of expatriate directors, like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger. Alfred Hitchcock’s early training in film was in Germany. In fiction, noir was a style even before it was known as noir. Usually called “hardboiled ” to refer to the main character , the prose is blunt, ironic, and tough. It emulates the language of the streets. As early as 1886, Mark Twain referred to U. S. Grant’s “hardboiled grammar.”1 Students of Latin often see the hard-boiled in Caesar’s blunt history of the Gallic Wars. As Raymond Chandler explained it, his hero “talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”2 But noir is more than style. The style is inseparable from the worldview it brings with it. Life is tougher than any prose that attempts to emulate it. Human beings are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. If God exists, he isn’t paying attention . Destiny is replaced by inevitability , by the irony of individuals bringing about their own destruction because of their very nature. “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself,” Marlowe says in The Long Goodbye. Yet noir lacks the tragic nobility of mankind accepting all that the gods can dish out. Noir is about what life, in its randomness, can dish out, about how a person reacts to events. And how do they react? According to their natures. This relates the literary ancestry of noir to the determinism of naturalism . Frank Chambers of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Walter Huff of Double Indemnity (1936) are very much the descendants of Laurent in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). The brutal Moose Malloy of Farewell, My Lovely (1940) carries the DNA of Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899). It is an interesting nugget of cultural history that the naturalistic, grim view of life that noir presents should take hold in what is usually thought of as can-do America. Perhaps its spirit became more prevalent as the result of the helplessness brought on by the Depression and the experience of two world wars. This glimpse of universal darkness, however, eventually proves too much to live with as the hard-boiled softens in the 1950s and 1960s. The private eye becomes heroic in the ways So Who Has Time to Read? Mediterranean Blue-collar Noir, Part 2 photo: The Postman Always Rings Twice – Michael Kain Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis November–December 2013 • 9 Crime&Mystery international 10 worldliteraturetoday.org that Chandler defines him at the end of “The Simple Art of Murder” and then evolves into a redemptive urban version of the strong-jawed hero in westerns. In the rest of the world, noir has tended to cling to the darker view implicit in the interwar period. It says much about today’s sense of destiny and justice in society that noir dominates the cutting edge of crime fiction. In an interesting time in which crime is on the decline in the industrial world, the bestseller lists are bulging with crime writing. In a recent blog in the Guardian, Adrian McKinty argued that crime writing was playing a role akin to what punk did for rock and roll in the 1970s.3 Punk swept out the dry and conventional music. Crime writing, he says, is shaking up literature, putting it in the streets and out of the universities and drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie that controls what is anointed serious literature. Among the most influential crime writers supposedly initiating this revolution is French author Jean-Claude Izzo. He died in 2000, only fifty-five years old, but is credited with having begun the “Mediterranean noir” movement, a transnational and cross-language style that is said to include writers from Italy, like...

Costume and Representation: Creating the Femme Fatale in American Film Noir

Early film noir is characterized by a portrayal of the world that is inherently threatening and dangerous, and the protagonist is often at the mercy of dark forces. role of the villain may be attributed to abstract concepts such as fate or late capitalism as well as to individuals, men and women alike. It is frequently embodied by the character best known as the femme fatale, the evil seductress who does not hesitate to manipulate the situation to her advantage. In this research, the femme fatale characters from Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Out of the Past (1947), are discussed to analyze their visual presence on screen with emphasis on lighting, characterization and costume.

The Postman Always Rings Twice: New York Appeals Court Validates Service of Process by Mail on Canadian Defendants

The recent decision of the New York Appeals Division in New York State Thruway Auth. v Fenech represents an American revolution in conflict of laws with fundamental implications to cross-border litigation.The Fenech decision overturns prior precedent against foreign service of process by mail under Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention. If the Fenech decision stands, it will put many process servers out of work and render service through the official diplomatic channels of the Central Authority moot. Canada should formally withdraw its Declaration under Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention that it does not object to service by postal channels. Otherwise, Canadian defendants in foreign proceedings are at a marked disadvantage, both in terms of challenging a foreign court’s assertion of personal jurisdiction and subject-matter jurisdiction. Personal service should remain the cornerstone of jurisdiction, bounded by the pillars of comity, reciprocity, good faith and order and fairness.

The Province Always Rings Twice: Christian Petzold’s Heimatfilm noir <em>Jerichow</em>

After achieving critical success as one of Germany’s leading contemporary film makers with his Gespenster/Ghosts trilogy (2000, 2005, 2007), Christian Petzold’s subsequent film, Jerichow (2008) has continued his interest in utilizing genre conventions to explore the dynamics between his central characters, lost in the forgotten and empty spaces of post-unification Germany, this “Zwischendeutschland.” A loose adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and thus assuming a position in an enduring series of celebrated film adaptations of the novel in Hollywood and European cinema, Petzold’s film sets the ménage-à-trois in place in the depopulated landscape of northeastern Germany. With the inevitable crime playing out against the “immanent borderscapes that make up the heart of late capitalist Germany” (Abel 2008), Petzold’s use of genre cinema again raises questions about the economic and political settlement of Germany set against the urban and provincial spaces of late capitalism, and about the impossibility of returning home.

Gendering Old and New Malay through Malaysian Auteur Filmmaker U-Wei Haji Saari’s Literary Adaptations, The Arsonist (1995) and Swing My Swing High, My Darling (2004)

This paper discusses two adapted works of the Malay film-maker U-Wei Haji Saari (b 1954): Kaki Bakar (The Arsonist, 1995), from William Faulkner's short story ‘Barn Burning’ and Buai Laju-Laju (Swing My Swing High, My Darling, 2004) from the novel by James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice. A close reading of these two films provides some insights into the filmmaker's thoughts on where Malay society is heading in terms of development, progress, social change and cultural values. The films focus on the tension between the individual and society, which is heightened by state capitalism and the drive for economic success. Along the way, each film deconstructs the notion of the achievement and success of the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1971–90) and suggests that men and women manage and manifest their existential anxieties differently. The author argues that Kaki Bakar and Buai Laju-Laju highlight oppositional dreams of individual versus collective Malay identity through movement and stasis, gendering stasis as traditional and male (Old Malay) and upward mobility as female (New Malay). Finally, Buai Laju-Laju's morally ambiguous ending, in which the femme fatale triumphs over the anti-hero, subtly comments on the social and moral costs of a state capitalist ideology that privileges developmentalism and materialism over human ethics.