The Postman Always Rings Twice

The disconnect between Rafelson’s low-key style and Cain’s hard-boiled storytelling is jarring at times. Read full review

An absolutely superb mounting of a hollow and disappointing production. It shows a technical mastery of filmmaking, and we are dazzled by the performances, the atmosphere, the mood of mounting violence. But by the second hour of the film we've lost our bearings: What is this movie saying about its characters? What does it feel and believe about them? Why was it necessary to tell their stories? Read full review

Both leads excel at showing a true feeling (be it love or lust) but both covered in the guilty angst that one will betray the other. Edge of your seat stuff. Read full review

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor. Read full review

In the key roles, Nicholson and Lange are excellent, as is Michael Lerner as their defense attorney. Read full review

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...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. Read full review

With a unity of mood, and some expert supporting performances, notably by John Colicos and Michael Lerner, it has the feel of tinny authenticity. [20 March 1981, p.17]

More frightening than most horror movies, more erotic than most pornography, The Postman Always Rings Twice (at the Imperial) is a sour slice of bona fide Americana, a relentlessly pessimistic melodrama that conjures memories of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and Chinatown. [21 March 1981]