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Raising Cain with the censors, again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Literature Film Quarterly, 2000 by Biesen, Sheri Chinen
James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, like Double Indemnity, was just one example of a 1930s novel that the Production Code Administration (PCA) would not touch but later endorsed during World War II when conditions were more appropriate. These potentially scandalous stories were reactivated as a cycle of dark film adaptations when it was institutionally viable and profitable. But while censorial resistance finally subsided, the film cycle itself caused controversy. For example, The Postman Always Rings Twice could not be produced in the same way as Double Indemnity-MGM had to "lighten it up," "white wash" and sanitize it.
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Nonetheless, both films were indicative of Hollywood's new wartime tendency toward a dark stylistic practice known as film noir which developed in relation to industry censorship during the 1940s. Paradoxically, film noir both complied with, yet undermined, Production Code censorship. Of course, the term film noir was coined after-the-fact by postwar French critics to describe earlier wartime American films, but what were Hollywood filmmakers trying to achieve in these films?
In examining film noir, censorship, and how controversial material got approved by Production Code censors, it is crucial to consider wartime production trends and how the industrial environment during World War II actually advanced film noir style. Within Hollywood's wartime studio system institutional setting, the adaptation of James M. Cain's hard-boiled fiction was significant in the transitional move toward non-war-related subject matter which cultivated racier "red meat" stories. In fact, wartime circumstances undermined the Code and allowed previously unacceptable material to be produced on screen.
Many scholars refer to this noir tradition as a decidedly postwar phenomenon. Yet, given this industrial context, film noir was significantly ` jump started" by the war. Paul Schrader explains that prototypes for noir films began appearing before the war. In fact, Schrader considers this dark tradition in relation to censorship and speculates that "were it not for the war, film noir would have been at full steam by the early forties. The need to produce allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledging moves toward a dark cinema . . . film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence" (Schrader 8-9).
However, certain wartime industrial circumstances actually compromised the strictures of the PCA s censorial enforcement. Presumed morally uplifting patriotic propaganda actually paved the way for increasingly sanctioned depictions of violence which functioned as a kind of cinematic precedent allowing racier narratives involving crime to be produced, such as Cain's graphic novels.
Crime, Passion & Cain
The screen adaptation of Cain's hard-boiled fiction was indeed seminal to the relationship between censorship and wartime film noir production in Hollywood. Frank Krutnik notes that Cain's literary "properties were secured by the studios because of their success," yet the industry had to wait until the "representational context" was "favourable" to produce these films (36). In The Dame in the Kimono, Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons provide a lucid analysis of the adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, arguing that studios "could never resist a potential blockbuster, much less one that smelled of scandal," and thus MGM chief executive Louis B. Mayer "sensed the wind shifting in Hollywood" and decided to produce Cain's story in October 1944 by submitting a new outline to the PCA (130).
While a darker, starker wartime economic and cultural environment informed the production context of this influential film noir, Cain's provocative crime-and-passion tale, banned by censors since its sale to MGM in 1934, did not just suddenly and metaphysically "spring up" as an "appropriate" Hollywood adaptation by this grand and arguably conservative studio. In a sense MGM's project was a sequel effort responding to the success of Cain's initial adaptation, Double Indemnity, as an industry precedent in navigating around the PCA and overturning a ban by chief Hollywood censor Joseph Breen.
Double Indemnity was released in Los Angeles in August 1944, and opened in New York in September 1944 to nearly unanimous critical accolades and box office revenues-earning $2.5 million in North American rentals (Cohn M-154). By November 19, 1944, The New York Times reported that Hollywood would rely on "red meat" stories of "illicit romance and crime" for non-war-related productions-a "trend" spurred by Paramount successfully maneuvering around censorship in adapting Cain's Double Indemnity. Moreover, "Last week's high mark in the `red meat' trend," the Times noted,
was the disclosure that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer intends to co-star John Garfield and Lana Turner in Mr. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio's archives until now because (to use a favored Hollywood expression) of Metro's "inability to clean it up." Closer to the cameras is another of Mr. Cain's novels, "Mildred Pierce" . . . scheduled to go into production this week at Warner Brothers . . . reported to be negotiating for the author's "Serenade." The screen version of Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep," in production at Warners, is said to be another example of ingenuity in treating of psychopathic and physiological matters. (Stanley "Hollywood Crime and Romance")
