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society and culture

Ossessione was filmed by Luchino Visconti four years before Tay Garnett's more literal adaptation of The Postman always rings twice. Nevertheless Visconti’s film is based directly on James M Cain’s novel.

As the first film in the Italian Neo-realist tradition that was to take world film-making by storm Ossessione is of interest anyway, but it is also a cracking film with good acting and directorial performaces and a sultry come-uppance plot that American film noir had been championing for years.

The Postman always rings twice came to the screen under that name, made by the US director WHO in 1946. Following the novel and Ossessione the lead woman is unfulfilled, lonely, trapped in a marriage she made to a rich tavern owner to escape the threat and actuality of poverty. When a poor drifter enters the scene, charged with youth and muscles, she sees an opportunity to escape the dead end she finds her life in.

Both films take us through the decision to murder and actual murder of the rich, fat husband, then show us the paranoia and guilt that affects the two plotters. They start to take out their fear on each other, and the perfect match they hoped for soon becomes a dreadful entrapment, both feeling that they are now tied to the other by bonds, Gina making this new relationship explicit when she tells her lover that he either stays with her or she reports him to the police.

Both films have the same plot, but the difference between the MGM and Visconti versions are huge. Visconti’s first film, he embues it with hopelessness and despair, making it less a noirish story than a meditation on society. The Postman always rings twice though is a true American thriller, hard boiled language and all.

While Visconti’s Ossessione is a black and white masterpiece, plumbing the depths of human emotion, The Postman always rings twice is a movie, with all that entails, stars, moody photography, American values.

review by JP