Analysis Of Tony Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Noir

Register to read the introduction… His introduction to the owner’s beautiful wife, named Cora Smith, is a fateful one as attested to by Frank’s voice-over narration of the story in which he later states, “I wish I had never met her.” Cora is a femme fatale, who leads to Frank’s destruction. The film language suggests—by the use of light and shadow—that she has power over him. Once Frank is inside, Cora’s husband seats him at the restaurant counter, where he is neatly framed by the criss-crossed grid of shadows cast onto the wall from the windowpanes. When Frank hears a clink on the floor, he looks down and sees a lipstick, dropped by Cora, rolling across the grid lines of the shadows on the floor near him. He retrieves the lipstick and is struck dumb by Cora’s beauty—her mesmerizing eyes and her sophisticated attire. Her close-fitting white shorts and a white turban are highly unusual clothing for a cook’s wife at a roadside diner. Frank is captivated, and the shadows, like the bars of a cage, suggest that he is being lured by lipstick bait into some sort of female trap. Her smoking-hot looks—she exudes carnality—also attest to her dangerous nature. When Cora disappears behind a door Frank smells something burning—hamburgers, as it turns out. He was enthralled by her looks, so hot her very presence in the room seemed to make burgers cook faster. …show more content…
His head is bandaged and his arm is in a sling, and the court procedure and lawyer tactics dismay him. He sits ashamedly as Cora reacts with a furious face—realizing that Frank has betrayed her. After the arraignment, Frank is wheeled into an antechamber where the criss-cross of shadows are again present. Frank’s wheelchair and bandages are very real physical confinements, but the criss-crossed shadows seem to symbolically express his mental paralysis.

He is quiet and his face is full of numb shock. He does not seem to trust anyone now and is smothered with feelings of helplessness and inadequacy. When Cora and her lawyer join him, Frank is further alienated. Cora walks circles around Frank as she scolds him as a liar and a “so-called …show more content…
He knows her power over him, but he didn’t really see the danger before. Now, Cora’s sophisticated appearance is alien, maybe her black clothing with turban is a visual clue to her dangerous nature. Frank, in his paranoid state, believes that Cora has manipulated him into killing her husband. He also fears that she has plans to pin the murder on him. In retrospect, could the whole nightmare experience be Cora’s devious plan? Maybe, in Frank’s subconscious, the criss-cross shadows on the hospital and courtroom walls are extensions of the lipstick trap with which Cora snared him in the first place. Maybe his confinement in the wheelchair and bandages and criss-crossed shadows are like the tangles of a spider’s web. Could this femme fatale be a spider woman, like the black widow who would entangle and poison and eat her