Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
because Poe, to whom we also owe so much, was a contempo- rary of Whitman. Poe and Whitman didn't know each other and I think it was better that way. They surely would not have been able to...
...Frank is a drifter who has just been hired by Nick Papadakis to work in the gas station attached to Nick's restaurant, and Cora is Nick's wife...
...All you can do is make it more explicit...
...Then she went into the lunchroom, but in a minute she was back...
...He retraces its path to the feet of Turner, who, as his eyes slowly ascend her, is wearin&white high heels, white shorts, a white sweat~, and an immaculate white turban...
...The MGM version is so wholesome it's almost a perversion of Cain...
...His experiment with the trinity of personage in Leaves of Grass was so successful that his own person has been obscured...
...I bit her...
...It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs...
...Nothing could he further from Cain...
...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...
...It is in that tradition that Turner is working when she drops her lipstick the In,st time Garfield sees her...
...She looked at me, and got pale...
...She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes...
...There desire for women who were out of reach had to he both kept alive and kept in bounds...
...The pin-up's message" was: ~, but don't touch --you might mess my hair, or smudge my lipstick...
...How come you married this Greek, anyway...
...Today, almost fifty years after Cain wrote Postman, you still couldn't top it for sheer raunchiness...
...So the scene where Nicholson grab-asses Jessica Lange in the new Postman may represent progress over the Turner22 May 1981:305...
...I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers...
...Poe died without knowing Whitman's poetry but he would have surely thought Whitman's poetry was written in blank verse because Whitman was very stupid and could not write in classical verse form...
...We know that Cain is in trouble assoon as the credits begin, because the copy of the novel see n in the background is in fact not Cain's slight, trashy pulp fiction, but a massive tome, something at least as epic and pretentious as Gone with the Wind...
...I shot it right close to her ear, almost in a whisper...
...Poe and Whitman didn't know each other and I think it was better that way...
...Whitman, on the other hand, never understood Poe either...
...They were opposites...
...With Whitman we think, as I said before, of an orator of joy, and so the great North American poet has become overwheimed by his creation...
...Our worst suspicions are conlrn'med the first time we lay eyes on Turner in the role of Cora...
...Instead of Cain's mussy nymphomaniac, Turner is an icy goddess...
...I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth...
...the vision of a lonely, unfortunate man whose life was short of happiness has been replaced by a species of semi-divine hero espousing democracy...
...As Garfield sits at the counter of the diner, a lipstick rolls across the floor...
...Certainly the novel's opening, where Frank and Cora are getting acquainted, is Cain at the top of his form...
...She jumped like 1 had cut her with a whip...
...I had what I,wanted...
...When we think of Byron, for example, we think less about "Don Juan" or "Childe Harold" than we do about his person...
...Frank tells us all about it in his own words: Then I saw her...
...When this film was made, America's erotic ideal was still the pin-up, that flossy memory of sex which had accompanied American servicemen overseas...
...This Poe never proposed to do, since he was at heart a rather dissolute aristocrat and a great romantic...
...I went out...
...And at this point we're only on page six...
...Screen RAZING CAIN THE SHOCK OF AMORALITY T HE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is p~l'ha[~ the best thing James M. Cain ever wrote...
...She went to the swinging door, and peeped through...
...From now on, it would he business between me and her...
...Bite me...
...I had socked one in under her guard, and socked it in deep, so it hurt...
...Whitman published an article saying that Poe was good, but that he was like a pianist who struck only the most majestic notes without portraying North American democracy...
...He knew Poe through his works, and when the latter died, he was somewhat unjust to him...
...Bite me...
...But I suppose I would have to admit it's an advance over the earlier Hollywood adaptation, which was done in the mid- 1940s at MGM with John Garfield and Lana Turner...
...She might not say yes, but she wouldn't stall me...
...S s She was so close I could smell her...
...And when we think of Poe we think of his person, that kind of macabre dandy...
...He throws her right on the kitchen table, where we get to watch them groping and pawing one another while he tries to mount her...
...because Poe, to whom we also owe so much, was a contemporary of Whitman...
...In the movie's version of the last scene quoted above, for instance, Frank (Jack Nicholson) doesn't carry off Cora (Jessica Lange) like a caveman retiring discreetly to the cave...
...And as for the themes, they, too, would have been distasteful to him: the theme of democracy and common everyday life no doubt would have seemed repulsive to Poe...
...This hardly represents progress in the arts when compared to the Cain original...
...At fu'st I thought that that was all Bob Rafelson had done in his new adaptation of the Cain classic...
...But perhaps the great difference between Poe and Whitman or, for that matter, Whitman and many other poets and writers, is that the debt we owe Poe is due more to his total image than to any story...
...And it has been Whitman's successful leap into his songs, the recreation of "Walt Whitman," that makes his Leaves of Grass the poetry of genius...
...They surely would not have been able to get along...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
