Author: James Mallahan Cain (1892-1977) was born in Maryland, and found work as a reporter in Baltimore shortly after the end of the first world war. He found his way to New York, becoming managing editor of the New Yorker magazine, before abruptly leaving for Los Angeles and a studio scriptwriting contract in 1931. He found Hollywood hard going, however, and began writing a novel, initially entitled Bar-B-Q. It was eventually published in 1934 as The Postman Always Rings Twice, setting a template for the powerful moral thrillers that became his trademark. Cain left Hollywood in the early 1950s, his best work behind him, and died back in Maryland aged 85.
Story: Cain wrote about the restless migrants who had headed for California after the depression, characters who resonated in the aspirational climate of the 1930s. Inspired by the celebrated case of Ruth Snyder, who, with a lover, had murdered her husband, The Postman Always Rings Twice created a simple triangular narrative that came to define the film noir template. The restless Frank stops at a roadhouse and meets Cora, an unhappily married woman; together they murder her husband, Nick. Neither can escape the consequence of their crime: Cora is killed in a road crash, and Frank executed.
Film-makers: Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) wasn't the first person to adapt Postman; French director Pierre Chenal made The Last Turn in 1939. Born into the Italian aristocracy, Visconti discovered Marxism when he migrated to Paris to work for Jean Renoir. Renoir gave a copy of the book to Visconti as the latter looked for material to assist in Italian cinema's drive for realism before the second world war (Ossessione's scriptwriters were all critics for the influential Cinemà magazine). No adaptation rights were ever acquired, and distribution of Ossessione was suppressed in the US by MGM, who had brought out their own adaptation. Lead actor Clara Calamai had achieved considerable notoriety in the Mussolini-controlled Italian film industry for briefly baring her breasts in La Cena delle Beffe (1941). Elio Marcuzzi, who played the enigmatic drifter Lo Spagnolo, was murdered by the Nazis in 1945.
How book and film compare: Ossessione is set in the Po river valley, a favourite hard-scrabble location for realist Italian cinema. Scriptwriter Guiseppe De Santis would direct another classic, Bitter Rice (1949), set among the same marshlands. The narrative structure remains similar, with the brawny Gino taking the frustrated Giovanna away from the good-natured but ugly Bragana. Ossessione's main innovations are that Bragana's death is a spur-of-the-moment crime passionel, unlike Frank and Cora's thought-out murder; and the invention of the character of Lo Spagnolo ("the Spaniard"), Gino's fellow drifter who sets the police on him, supplies a clear homoerotic undertone.
Inspirations and influences: A key film in the development of Italian Neo-Realist cinema (generally thought to have fully flowered with Rossellini's Rome Open City in 1945), Ossessione distils many of Neo-Realism's tropes: location photography, non-professional actors, a reverence for the worker, a rejection of studio-produced slickness. The film's grimy realism was counterpointed by Visconti's high-camp instincts. leading eventually to operatic melodramas such as Senso (1954) and Rocco and His Brothers (1960).
