 Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stay her from the swift completion of her appointed seduction. 
Above is a trolley card for the classic Lana Turner/John Garfield film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, which according to the text, opened at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles today in 1946. What's a trolley card? Pretty much self-explanatory, that. But you don't see many surviving examples, so this is a real treasure. The opening date represents new info. All the websites we checked said the movie opened in L.A. May 9. Maybe the managers of the Egyptian had connections at MGM. Awesome connections, we guess, to have helped them beat the rest of town by two full days. With that kind of juice, it's safe to assume they only had to ring once at the studio gates. We worked in the L.A. film industry. Relationships are everything. Or maybe the movie actually opened today, and the internet is wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. Not that we're trying to sound superior. We've made errors more than once. Interestingly, we were able to locate a vintage photo of the Egyptian with its marquee advertising Postman. It's a great movie. Nobody needs us to tell them that, but we did anyway, at this link.  
 Whoa... is the floor swaying or is that me? 
Audrey Totter isn't as well known today as she should be, considering she appeared in The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lady in the Lake, F.B.I Girl, The Unsuspected, The Set-Up, Main Street After Dark, and Tension, but she was well appreciated in her day as a bad girl and film noir stalwart. Her career spanned radio, cinema, and television, and her life spanned ninety-five years, a good run on both counts. This promo photo of her in the typical bad girl's natural habitat—the local gin mill—was made in 1946 and appeared in Life magazine.
 There's no way to avoid paying what's owed. 
We just talked about the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, so why not take a moment to focus on the movie, since it premiered today in 1946? Even if it weren't a widely known classic of lust and murder, when John Garfield fetches up at a rural gas station and sees a sign that reads “man wanted,” you suspect where the movie is going. Such a sign, if posted by Nick, the owner, could say “help wanted” or “job available,” but as worded it cleverly establishes the subtext that it's his platinum blonde wife Lana Turner that really wants a man. Garfield and Turner's mutual attraction is immediate and obsessive. The affair starts shortly thereafter, leads to a failed scheme to run off together, then finally devolves into a murder plot. But murder in film noir is never easy. Character-wise, some edges were rounded off James M. Cain's novel, which was a good decision—those two lovers are throughly reprehensible; Garfield and Turner at least generate some sympathy. But not too much—murderers are murderers and just desserts are just for a reason. Highly recommended flick.      
 Once you open the package there's no returning the contents. 
There are numerous vintage editions of James M. Cain's classic thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice out there, including one from the Spanish publisher Bruguera that we showed you years ago, but we recently got our hands on this 1947 Pocket Books edition, with a cover by Tom Dunn. We read the book, and there are several interesting aspects to the novel, including frightening violence, a generally amoral view of the world, and this: I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers... “Bite me! Bite me!” I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs. Obsessive lust. We get it. Still, it's bizarre. Then there's this: "Well, get this. I'm just as white as you are, see? I may have dark hair and look a little [Mexican], but I'm just as white as you are." [snip] It was being married to that Greek that made her feel she wasn't white. Caustic racism. Later the femme fatale, Cora, explains that she simply cannot tolerate having a child with the aforementioned husband, who she married for security. “I can't have no greasy Greek child, Frank. I can't, that's all.” Cain establishes with this style of banter that his two main characters are bad people. But The Postman Always Rings Twice is great, and nobody ever said literature is supposed to be easy to read. This is fast-paced pulp fiction that's about as good as you'll ever find. Highly recommended.
 The postman will ring as long as it takes. 
This shot of American actress Lana Turner shows her at the height of her fame during the filming of the 1946 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Turner’s own life rivaled that of any of her characters, encompassing the murder of her father to her daughter stabbing a Mafia thug to death.
 All he had to give was everything he had. 
Was boxing ever honest? We doubt it. How could a sport with the scoring done in secret be anything but a scam? Body and Soul tells the story of a champion boxer named Charley Davis whose rise has occurred under the thumb of organized crime and who is now required to lose his title to a brash, 20-year-old upstart. That doesn’t sit too well with Charley, who may be corrupt and mob-owned, and who has wrecked everything good in his life for money and a femme fatale, but whose talent is real. One of the first and best boxing movies, Body and Soul—with John Garfield as Charley, Hazel Brooks as the femme fatale Alice, and Lilli Palmer as his loyal girlfriend—is a nearly flawless classic. After his performance here, and in the previous year’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Garfield’s film career should have been long and decorated, but in 1950 he was blacklisted during the Communist witch hunts that swept Hollywood, and by 1952 he was dead from a heart attack. Body and Soul premiered in the U.S. today in 1947.
 Wow this expensive body wash is great. Hope the missus doesn’t catch me using it. 
We’ve seen a lot of covers for James M. Cain’s classic 1934 pulp The Postman Always Rings, but never one quite as unhinged as this Bruguera Spanish edition. Whereas the art is almost comical, in the fiction Cain’s murderous lovers are anything but. In fact, Postman was considered so provocative for its time that it was banned in Boston. The book is short (possibly that’s why it’s paired here with Cain’s The Embezzler), and its concise story arc made it a natural for adaptation to cinema. Over the years it spawned four official film versions, and its influence is detectable in many other movies. We recommend giving this one a read, and also, take the lesson of the cover to heart and leave your girl’s fancy soaps alone.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1969—Manson Followers Continue Rampage
A day after murdering actress Sharon Tate and four others, members of Charles Manson's cult kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson personally orchestrates the event, but leaves the LaBianca house before the killing starts. 1977—Son of Sam Arrested
The serial killer and arsonist known as Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is arrested in Yonkers, New York. He turns out to be 24-year-old postal employee David Berkowitz. He had been killing people in the New York area for most of the previous year. 1945—Nagasaki Destroyed
The United States detonates a nuclear bomb codenamed Fat Man over the city of Nagasaki. It is the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan. 40,000 to 75,000 people are killed immediately, with tens of thousands more sickening and dying later due to radiation poisoning. The U.S. had plans to drop as many as seven more bombs on Japan, but the nation surrendered days later. 1969—Manson Followers Murder Five
Members of a cult led by Charles Manson murder pregnant actress Sharon Tate and coffee heiress Abigail Folger, along with Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent. The crimes terrify the Los Angeles celebrity community, and even today continue to fascinate the worldwide public. 1963—Gang Pulls Off Great Train Robbery
A fifteen member gang robs a train of £2.6 million at Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn near Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, England. Thirteen of the fifteen are later caught, but some subsequently escape from prison, and one, Ronnie Biggs, is only recaptured in 2001 after voluntarily returning to England. 1974—Nixon Resigns
After two years of public outcry over the Watergate scandal, U.S. president Richard M. Nixon announces to a national television audience that he will resign, effective the next day. Vice President Gerald R. Ford completes the remainder of Nixon's term.
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