Post Mark of Cain

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Post-Mark of Cain

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

Directed by Bob Rafelson; Screenplay by David Mamet

Bam BAM BAM goes the novel, with the collision force of mean men's fists or lovers' thighs. Chapter One: Frank and Cora meet. Two: they make big bloody love. Three: they plot the murder of her husband Nick. Four: the murder attempt fails. Five: they set out for a life on the road, then split. Six: Frank returns to her. Seven: this time they do kill Nick. Eight: they make love over his corpse. Nine: they are charged with his murder. Ten, Eleven, Twelve ... In bold, remorseless strokes, and fewer than 100 pages, James M. Cain etched a portrait of animal lust and human need, of mania and the Depression, of the original sin and spectacularly convoluted forms of retribution. Its narrative travels the arc of electricity from the first shock of sexual attraction to the final jolt of death-row juice. The 1934 novel was a banned-in-Boston bestseller, and moviemakers have sprained their backs ever since trying to get it right onscreen.

The new film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's cafe is just a short drive from Hollywood, Cora knows the only spotlight she is likely to appear in is the concupiscent glare from men across the counter. Frank knows he's several criminal convictions past a prime he never had. But his rutting passion for Cora offers them both the reckless hope of transcendence.

The film's steamy sex scenes--especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures. In part this is because The Postman appears at a time when moviemakers seem to have forgotten that the libido exists, in part because these scenes are the film's only submissions to spontaneity. This Postman is a true period piece-not 1934, but the early '70s, when American and European directors were investigating functions of the apocalyptic orgasm from behind a modernist screen. Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

Rafelson makes handsome, careful movies (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens) about outcasts fighting a system all too ready to ignore them. At times, his Postman is too handsome, too careful: Rafelson caresses every ladder in Cora's stockings, every crescent of dirt under Frank's fingernails, until they become aspects of art direction. Jack Nicholson's performance as Frank is studied too. The dashing star of a decade ago has dared to inhabit the molting seediness of the character actor. So Cora must choose between two middle-aged galoots: one offers her security, the other release. This is her chance to come alive, and she grabs for it.

As Cain saw it, woman was the temptress, and Cora was a wailing siren --Circe in a highway diner. Jessica Lange's Cora is trapped, no less than Nick and Frank, by the grim imperatives of the Depression and her search for the deepest sense of identity through sex. The actress's presence and gestural eloquence provided Rafelson with this point of focus: Cora knows who she is and what men will do to possess her. A fraternity of appraising eyes follows her on the streets, in court, at the diner. One managing, sad-faced, respectably poor-emerges from the crowd to remark that they are from the same town; he brightens a moment as he adds simply, "Oh, you don't remember me, but I remember you." Jessica Lange deserves to be remembered as Cora. Her fierce commitment makes this Postman something more than the sum of its private parts.

As Cora in The Postman, Jessica Lange is tall and erect and self-possessed. Her anarchic blond hair frames a face dominated by classic cheekbones and sulfurous dark eyes, suggesting a Faye Dunaway who does not yet know she is beautiful. She has the strength and solidity of a heroic sculpture--Maillol's Leda, perhaps--a peasant-goddess rooted in the earth. With this performance, Lange has passed from the status of minor curiosity as the heroine of Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong to that of respected actress and, maybe, star. Jack Nicholson thinks so: he calls her "the sex star of the '80s."

Just now, the sex star has another priority: breast-feeding an eight-pound girl named Alexandra, the first child of Lange and Mikhail Baryshnikov, artistic director of American Ballet Theater. When he heard the news two weeks ago, Baryshnikov, who was in Buffalo with A.B.T., flew back to Manhattan to see his daughter. "She's beautiful," says Lange, 31, of Alexandra, who was delivered by natural childbirth. "I was enormously proud that she came into the world naturally. But then my baby is bright and alert. She made it easy." Lange seemed almost as pleased to talk about her other "first-born": the starmaking role she calls "the first real acting I've done."

Most actresses would have taken pride in the daft charm that Lange brought to her debut in King Kong; few actresses could have gracefully endured the Kong hype to which she was subjected. "I was naive," she says, "and it brought me pain. For a while I lost control over my own life. I didn't work for two years." So when Bob Rafelson walked into a motel room in North Carolina, where Lange was appearing in a threadbare sex comedy, she was ready to show him what moviegoers had missed. Rafelson recalls that he found "an incredibly sensual woman who made no effort to be sensual. I thought that if I could get this woman to be on-screen the way she was in repose, she would be utterly striking." He took her to Hollywood for screen tests with Jack Nicholson. Two years before, she had tested for Nicholson's Coin' South. She lost that part, but he sent her roses and a note that read: "I'm sure we'll work together some time soon. We will have lots of fun and make lots of money. Love, Jack."

As the child of a dreamer-drifter who changed jobs and home towns every two years, Jessica had developed an active fantasy life, seeing Gone With the Wind 14 times, writing letters as Rhett Butler to herself as Scarlett. Now she would invent a life for Cora, to flesh out the novel's sparse details. Says she: "I imagined Cora's movements from the Midwest to Hollywood. I painted her parents with people familiar to me. I was from the Midwest. I had worked as a waitress. I had a grasp of reality."

Nicholson says that the kitchen-table scene was acted "at a pretty high energy level. You film two people making love, and it is not simple sex. It moves out of reality into an erotic ballet that touches everything: compulsion, love, death. Jessica made me sexy. She does that. Few are the men who do not want to fall at her feet. She's a big, consensus movie sex bomb." Miss Scarlett, meet Mr. Butler.

Lange is more modest, as befits an actress on whose erotic and dramatic appeal The Postman will succeed or fail at the box office. "That kind of ferocity can happen to any woman or man," she says. "When it happens, the emotions are magnified a hundred times. The erotic is basic to life, and it's basic to the film's story. If people see it that way, I'll be very pleased."

-By Richard Corliss. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis

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