The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway), the middle-aged proprietor of a roadside restaurant, hires drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield) as a handyman. Frank eventually begins an affair with Nick's beautiful wife Cora (Lana Turner), who talks Frank into helping her kill Nick, by "accident." But the best laid plans...cause hilarity to ensue.

Trivia: This caused a stir amongst 1940s audiences who were shocked when it seemed clear to them that John Garfield uses his tongue in one of his kissing scenes with Lana Turner. Lana Turner said that her turn as Cora Smith was "the role I liked best". It took 12 years to adapt the explicit material (by 1940 standards) of the novel into a screenplay tame enough to comply with the Production Code prevalent at the time.

Umm...What the heck does the title of this movie have to do with the actual movie? I mean, there is no postman, and the word postman is never even said, you have to wait till the last two minutes of the movie to figure it out and then it was still kind of "Huh?" Is this a generational thing? My postperson (got to be politically correct nowadays) would never even come to the door, if I have to sign for something, they just leave a note for me to come to the post office. Okay, I know it has to do with having to pay for your sins (What goes around comes around, you have to pay the piper, and all those other cliches). Okay, now for Lana Turner and those dresses. Everything she wears is white (except one notable exception where she wears black and thinks about killing Nick) but besides that, all white. I had heard that Lana Turner was really evil in this movie, or rather that she gained her bad girl reputation from this movie (she is known for her bad girl roles, but she only played the bad girl a few times) and I really started to wonder why, but she got worse (in a good way) as time went on and then I thought that one of the main reasons people gave her this reputation was that Nick, her husband was probably the nicest person every shown on film, this guy was a saint and they very casually plan to whack him.