Postman Always Rings Twice Essay

The 1946 film The Killers is a renowned film noir based off of Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same title, focusing on the detailed backstory and investigation for the motive of the murder of Pete Lund/Ole Anderson, commonly known and referred to as “The Swede.” A film noir is a term made originally to describe American mystery and thriller movies produced in the time period from 1944-1954, primarily marked by moods of menace, pessimism, and fatalism. Although the film does not focus on the war itself at all, it still puts forth interesting new ways in how gender relations can be stereotypical as well as divergent proceeding the Second World War.

The Film Noir, “The Third Man”, showed the evident effect that World War 2 had on people. Since this film was produced in 1949, after World War 2, it reflected the social fears and cultural changes that have plagued people during post war. Before the war, there was the ideology of the strong American family. This family portrayed strong values such as happiness, hardworking, and optimism. However during post war, there was a shade of darkness as fear, greed and evil lurking. ‘The Third Man’ portrayed the social, economic and moral corruption which reflects off the social evils during the post war era.

It is unsurprising that Wilder—in creating Sunset Boulevard— chose film noir to exhibit the cynicism and despair of those mistreated and thrown away by the film industry. In his essay “Notes on Film Noir”, author Paul

The term film noir was coined by French critics for 1940s-50s American films that shared a dark sensibility and a dark lighting style, such as Double Indemnity (1944), Out of the Past (1947), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Many theorists related the common noir attributes and aesthetic elements to a post war society characterised by insecurity about gender roles, the economy, changing definitions of race, and nuclear technology. One of the cultural problems the term genre attempts to address is the gender question. The familiarity of the femme fatale character across film noir is the predominant cause for discussion amongst feminist theorists. Feminist theorists became, and still remain, interested in the woman's portrayal in

The years surrounding the Great Depression and World War II were neither pleasant domestically nor internationally. During the Great Depression, businesses and industries fell rapidly, people became unemployed, and chaos ensued in trying to pick the global economy back up. Like every other industry, the movie industry, albeit a few years later than others, suffered a massive dip. Despite the conditions, however, many Americans still went to see movies, averaging around 60 to 80 million patrons every week. During this time, movies were not necessarily a means of escaping real world problems despite the fact that they did help to keep morale stable. Instead, movies that were produced in this era could be seen more as following a trend of realism, as we saw a rise in criminal, gangster, and scandal movies (Hollywood).

To define a film by a certain genre, there are several elements and signatures that a film will display in order to signify its place amongst the genre. A film from the gangster genre is characterized by violence and lawlessness of american capitalism and The American Dream. The short lived classical era of the gangster genre in Hollywood is also greatly influenced by the production code which manifested the iconic moral narrative of the gangster genre. William A. Wellman’s 1931 film The Public Enemy can be considered a film of the gangster genre when one examines the conflict with the American dream, the rise and fall of the protagonist Tom Powers, as well as the visual storytelling employed to support the narrative.

Tony Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) seems a quintessential film noir. The title suggests a fateful conclusion for the two main characters—a flawed drifter named Frank (John Garfield) and his restless female conspirator, Cora (Lana Turner). Garnett’s crime drama is crafted with the stylish devices usually characteristic of the film noir genre—low-key lighting; a flawed, inept hero; and an archetypal femme fatale. Certain thematic codes are also persistent: psychological conflict, paranoia, fate, and moral ambiguity. Three telling scenes communicate the noir stylistics effectively—where nearly all of the devices converge simultaneously: (1) Frank’s first meeting

According to Philippa Gates, “the rise of film noir coincided with a new need to Americanize the onscreen hero in a response to the changing international climate with America's entry into World War II” (Gates 16). Suddenly, the eloquence and wealth of the soft-boiled hero were taken from him and realigned with the villain. Much like the monster movies that were to be produced during the Cold War, The Maltese Falcon defined the threat to American society as something “other,” specifically European. That is not to say that elegance and charm were considered villainous in the 1940s, but that protagonists could no longer embody such traits that were associated with “otherness.” Because of the wartime atmosphere surrounding The Maltese Falcon’s production, the villains of the movie—chiefly Gutman, Wilmer, and Cairo—are designed to highlight Spade’s more heroic qualities.

Development and adaptation of the western genre has occurred throughout the twentieth century in relation to the shift in context, this is still relevant. Stereotypes of a western genre and the context are determined by the time in which the film is being produced. The time in which they were produced determine how social construction, gender ideas, values and attitudes, the setting and SWAT codes are demonstrated. I have chosen to present this speech by looking at the film studied in class, and a film of my choice and how the difference in context has changed in the tie of these two films.

Aristotelian mimesis dictates that the “art” produced by our culture and society is an imitation of our reality. If so, then our contemporary entertainment era overstocked in brooding, morally ambiguous anti-heroes bearing five o’clock shadows and “dark and gritty” narratives are a reflection of the flawed and unrelenting modern-day reality that we inhabit. This age of morally gray storytelling is a stark contrast to the idealistic depictions of American society and “traditional family values” found throughout various 1950s television (Museum of Broadcast Communications). The force behind this shift from a rather jubilant, dreamlike state of Cold War era media, to the grim and cynical state of present-day film, television, and music can thus be interpreted by some romanticists with a longing for the “good ol’ days” as a decline of virtues and goodness in American society. However, the “goodness” of America found in 1950s media was hardly a true reflection of reality. Through the further development of mass media and communications in the following decades, however, American audiences were then able to see passed the “goodness” from the shelter of their own homes (Murray). The realities that went into the lenses of news cameras, and out the screens of black and white television tubes exposed the horrors of war in Vietnam and the injustice towards nonviolent Black protestors to the archetypical nuclear families of America, distorting their idealized perceptions of American

investigation and comparison of the film Menace II Society and the social and economic issues

This essay is based on films of the same story, told in different ways, with emphasis, themes, meaning and interpretation shaped or shaded by the situation of the storyteller; the cinematic mise-en-scene. Based on the same story, the films reveal and reflect the film-maker’s social norms and views, emerging from their different national contexts. While exploring the two films, this essay will examine elements of film language or semiotics: color saturation (or black and white), sound, setting, type of camera angles used; repetition of visual motifs (Metz, 1985). The two films explored were made in the 1960s. Neither film is American, yet both reveal influences and reflections on American cinema and American power; the Western film, adherence or detracting from Hollywood Classical cinema tropes, i.e. close-ups, shot-reverse-shot, POV, depth of field (Bazin, 1985: 128-9). The two films are Kurasawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964), from Japan and Italy, respectively. How are they different; how similar? Why do they use the same plot,

The 1930’s were a difficult time for America and her people. The Great Depression put millions worldwide into deep poverty and invoked historic deviations from the standing political structure. The political ideals of Communism and Fascism were gaining more and more popularity among the middle classes across Europe and Asia. Communism especially, was becoming a grave threat to the established precedent of democracy. The growing global clashes of these varying ideologies is often seen as a catalyst of World War II in the late nineteen thirties. However, a several months before the start of war, the release of Frank Capra’s latest film,

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic roman noir story, first banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism then published in 1934. The story is a significant psychological novel that tackles the problem of a young, beautiful woman, who married middle age man and falling in an inconvenient marriage that leads to both infidelity and death. Cain uses first person narrator and taking into consideration the economy of words, but sharply and significant at the same time, he ignores the past histories of his characters and places the reader into the action of the story in the very first paragraph: “They threw me off the hay truck”, that takes three months with chronological events and full of suspense, even the title

  In this way these films represent the American public after World War 2.   Broke, depressed, and desperate for fantasy, post-crash Americans looked at glamorous Europeans for how to find