Although lacking the enigmatic complexity of Cora, Frank is equally ambiguous and ambivalent to his life choices, and Garfield well conveys the multi-sidedness of Frank. Garfield, in probably the role of his career, is equally superb, at first rejecting the murder scheme and then later embracing it. She remains enigmatic from beginning to end which is I think what Cain would have wanted. Sometimes hard and mean and other times sweet and feminine, she is the complex epitome of the Cain femme fatale of this era. More like a cross between Eva Peron and Madonna. We gather that Cora is no ordinary woman, or at least not the soft sentimental Doris Day type. Turner continually shows us the many faces of her character Cora Smith who is sometimes weak and vulnerable and other times resolute and stubborn, even unsympathetic, and yet oozing with unrealized sexuality. In fact, the star of the show is really Turner who turns in a tour-de-force performance. Still, the movie works very well under its own terms, particularly because of the outstanding chemistry between the leads John Garfield and Lana Turner. That said, the movie still holds its own as a noir tale of betrayal and murder, but doesn't quite have the edge of Billy Wilder's adaption of 'Double Indemnity'.

The movie adaption of twelve years later is a slightly sentimentalized version of Cain's noir classic. Cora, we learn, is dissatisfied with her life married to this older immigrant and the drifter becomes her catalyst to change her situation.

Cain (author of 'Double Indemnity') was a gritty unsentimental story of a low-class drifter and bum, Frank, who is taken in by a German immigrant, Nick, who owns a roadside café and his beautiful wife, Cora, who turns out to be much darker on the inside than the facade of her pure white skin. The original book published in 1934 by James M.

The postman always rings twice author