The Postman Always Rings Twice

Dir. Tay Garnett (1946).
It’s more MGM than James M. Cain, but Tay Garnett’s overly polite adaptation of the archetypal adultery-murder meller can boast a hot couple of studio stars in Lana Turner and John Garfield.

Fri., Dec. 17, 10 a.m., 2010

More:Culture James M. Cain John Garfield Lana Turner

Archive Highlights

Punk ’77: A Cult Explodes, and a Movement Is Born

“I haven’t been this excited about rock and roll in at least 10 years. First it was isolated artists, then a vanguard, but now it looks like a movement.”

by Robert Christgau
News & Politics

Reflections on Watergate: John Mitchell’s Death Mask

“His cheeks, colored by a network of ruptured blood vessels, were formed by a coalescence of hanging globules, beneath which the double fold of his chin melted into his neck. And his skull was strung with cords of fat.”

by Leonard Orr
Music

Rock Death in the ’70s: A Sweepstakes

"Do not the dead deserve an accounting at least as irreproachable as the survivors receive with each week’s edition of Billboard?"

by Greil Marcus
Film

Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Filmmaker

“One day his trajectory from junior high dropout to Video Archives clerk to cinema wunderkind may eclipse L.A.’s longstanding specimen tale of Lana Turner at Schwab’s.”

by Lisa Kennedy
From The Archives

The White Issue: White Like Who?

“When did whites come into the world? When was the first time that Europeans, faced with otherness, looked at each other and said, ‘We’re white’?”

by Edward Ball
The City

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now

“New York isn’t the center of the universe, this IS the universe, and since I’m here, I’m important, too.”

by Jan Hoffman

Voice Choices

The Postman Always Rings Twice

by Jim Hoberman

Archive Highlights