The popularity of Lana Turner and John Garfield with audiences might explain why The
Postman was one of the hits of the year at the box office (Maltby, 2003, 566). But the rarity of this
kind of film in MGM’s production of the forties is evidence of how the style of this company started to look anachronistic at this time, when in general profits were decreasing, together with Oscar nominations and future prospects (Cook and Bernink, 1999, 18). As stated, Metro preferred to release polished version of romantic comedies, or musicals. In fact, when, a few years later in 1948, the same company distributed another film noir, Force of Evil, independently produced but also with John Garfield as lead, its intervention condemned the film to premature failure. On this occasion, MGM ordered some extra cuts and released the film on Christmas Day, hardly good timing for a tale linking the worlds of business and crime. The same film, years later, was to be hailed as one of the most radical films ever made, but by then the Studio System had collapsed (Nott, 2003, 233-234).
All these episodes confirm the involvement of major studios in the making and screening of film noir in the forties, and illustrate the differences in style and politics of their output depending on the ways they employed their artistic and technical resources. In the case of The
Postman, for example, we have seen how political conformism, self-regulating institutions and
glamorisation of actors took precedence over critical treatment of social themes and challenge to representational routines. Similarly, the issues of intertextuality and ambivalence examined in the previous chapter were channelled into Metro’s glossy production values, using star actors as a way of establishing routines both in the production of movies and in their reception. In this sense, social discourses implicit in society (e.g. murder, sexual attraction, youth, beauty, social criticism,
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comsumerism etc.) can be embedded, through a film star, into a coded symbolic narrative (Hall, 1992). An audience makes sense of the narrative, a new film, to be decoded (ibid.), according to their own orientations and expectations, familiarising with a new product, a new story, through the presence of a recognisable main lead, or a recognisable type of film (Freud, 1955). Thus in the passage from one medium to another (novel to film) a gradual elimination of the controversial scenes of Cain’s Depression novel has transformed a story of self-destructive desire and racial hate into a romantic visual tale about doomed lovers in search of final redemption, against the backdrop of some imprecise historical era and effective social policing. I refer here to the ‘cultural policing’41of the film studio, in the prior careful selection of the elements of the story that are going into the final product, as a result of exclusion of some controversial social issues in favour of others. Each film studio had a range of priorities to represent in its movies, according to issues of product differentiation in a competitive market, or in reproducing common or controversial issues already current in society at a particular time.
The casting of the main two actors in their roles in Postman engaged with Hollywood’s stereotype of using women as subsidiary to the action normally carried out by men (Haskell, 1974, 97). As Laura Mulvey claims, ‘The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story- line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative’ (Mulvey, 1973, 384). According to this view, the eroticisation of women in classic Hollywood films works at two levels: as erotic objects for both the protagonists and the spectator, while the male character plays the hero (or anti-hero) who tends to have power to intervene in the events of the narrative. This distinction thus seems to underpin the seductive power of the female character in film noir, as she needs to figure next to a male figure, within a patriarchal order, in order to part of that power she is excluded from (Krutnik, 1991, 140). In this sense, Cora is married to a much older husband in order to secure her domestic
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41 By cultural policing I mean to the practices of control and administration in the production of symbolic
forms, within a certain institution, in which a certain selectivity and censorship is established in the selection, development and representation of some issues over others. For a discussion of this concept in the light of cultural policies and politics, see McGuian, 1996, 6ff.