From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin -When Miss Cora Swayed

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1946 film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie a guy up so bad he will go to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly squeezing him. That is he will not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.

Here’s the funny part and you know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, the guy will go to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around that frail, frill, twist. dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all, six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that smile, ah, half-smile as they lead him away. Yah, guys just like Frank.

Frank Jackman had it bad. [But you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua Lawrence Breslins, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less, other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it bad as a man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door from the back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, a cup of joe in her hand. Just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns.

She breezed, Frank thought later when he tried to explain it, explain everything that had happened and how to anyone who would listen, trade winds breezed in although this was the wrong coast for that, in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along, with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned, lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that he had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out. Jesus.

I might as well tell you, just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me like I was some father-confessor, and maybe I was, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it did play out. Not at all. No way. He could have just turned around anytime he said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late regret. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into damn overdrive like our boy Frank.

Listen up a little and see if Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon. He was just stumbling, like he said, from one half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines) in some flop garage here, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed that part of the story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a bad dream.

Hell, the way he was going, after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre bosses standing over his sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.

Here is where luck is kind of funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because, for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and moon pie. But that smell got the better of him. So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open. And then she walked through the damn door.

She may have been just another blonde, a very blonde frail, just serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint as he found out later, but from second one when his eyes eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.

What he should have asked, and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast Podunk when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana hair.

And she did. Story number one was the “serve them off the platter” hubby short-ordering behind the grill in that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change somebody, including his Cora. Story number two, and go figure, said hubby didn’t care one way or the other about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis drunk as a skunk nights. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Story number four, the one that would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be “grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.

Peter Paul Markin Interlude One: “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen once I saw her coming through that door for him, for Frank, to get the hell out of there at that moment. This dame was poison, no question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented eyes for a minute and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell, just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have too, get your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”

But here is where fate works against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned back to look at Frank with those languid eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice “Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know, that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought a fresh deck of Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of the convenience pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank, lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except for dreams, and that final half-smile.

Peter Paul Markin Interlude Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank, not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there was no crying there.”

Here is what is strange, and while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed, the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A. gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.

Even with all of that Frank still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school crush sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.

He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute, although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from those white shorts Manny was done for.
And once Frank had sealed his fate (and hers too) on that midnight roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact. Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap jack little heart he too knew he was done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.

The way Frank told it even I knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board in order to get a full glance at Cora and try his “line” on her (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for business and harmless, and maybe it was with them) knew it. Knew it the minute he sat at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on that run.

Damn, any dated –up teen-age joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock (and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts, asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so she could take a shot at Cora himself.

Hell even the California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed in one of the rooms over the garage that things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock at.

Look I am strictly a money guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never got messed up with some screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending time later. And maybe if I had gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop was present too. Then he /they could have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.

These two amateurs gummed up the job every which way, gummed it so that even a detective novel writer would turn blush red with shame. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and nothing for amateurs to mess around with. They tried one thing, something with poison taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it didn’t take. Then they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they just did the old gag that the cops have been wish to since about 1906 and conked him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car over the cliff. Jesus, double jesus.

Peter Paul Interlude Three: “Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest caper she’s setting you up. Who drove the car, who got the whiskey, who knew how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny? Why don’t you just paint a big target on your chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams. You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that skirt –crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”

If you want the details, want to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall editions of the Los Angeles Gazette. They covered the story big time, and the trial too. That’s just the details though. I can give you the finish now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah, Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all the way to the end. Do you need to know more?

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- She Stoops To Conquer

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity

“Yah, he had it bad alright. He had it bad for her right up until her last breath, and maybe after that for all he knew, maybe for eternity. It might have been that way; it is sometimes, sometimes when a thing is written in the stars. Even if they are star-crossed stars,” opined my old time Olde Saco, Maine schoolboy friend Jimmy Jacques when he related to me the story about two lovers who in the end had a falling-out that no love, and no uncrossed stars, could survive.

Jimmy was always telling me, even in high school where we ran track together, stories about the underside of life, about star- crossed stuff once he found out that I was a fan of black and white crime noir films from the 1940s and 1950a and their tales of crime doesn’t pay, thieves falling out among themselves, and gun-blaring femme fatales, especially that last category. Yes, I have it bad , real bad for hard-as-nails-hard loving, hard-hating femmes who don’t mind throwing a slug, or six, into some guy, some guy who still comes up grinning and asking for more. And this one, this Jimmy Jacques one, related a few years back, actually about twenty years back now that I think of it, before I moved back to the old home town and he came to see me when I lived in California, had them all. More importantly he was there when Willy Webb spilled his guts about her, about the hold she had on him, and how it had to end, end the way it did, just like in the movies, except for the real blood.

Here is how Jimmy told it, or really how Willy told it to Jimmy like he was some father-confessor. And maybe for that moment that is what Willy thought Jimmy was although one look at Jimmy would tell, tell clear as day, that he had not even a passing acquaintance with god since the old days at Ste. Brigitte’s.

See Jimmy and Willy worked together for a while down at the Olde Saco Garage. A- One mechanics working on cars, young and old, right after they got out of high school. Although they knew each other in high school, passing corridor nod knew each other, it was at the garage that they became fast friends. Sharing a taste, like a lot of guys who aren’t mechanics, for fast cars, fast liquor highs, and fast women, especially the last. Then Willy drifted off to find better work at a high- end garage up in Bar Harbor fixing dents and fine-tuning the precision motors of the automobiles of the Mayfair swells that flocked there in summer and for the “townies,” the rest of the year.

The years passed and Jimmy and Willy lost touch. Then one day Willy showed up at the garage where Jimmy was now part-owner as he was passing through town. He told Jimmy that, if things, things left unspoken, worked out right with a woman thing he had going maybe he and Jimmy could swing a deal to buy the place where he worked as an ace mechanic for the swells. Sweet, easy street work. Jimmy didn’t hear from Willy again
until one night when Willy showed up at the open bay door of the garage where Jimmy had been working late on some jazzed up green 1964 Mustang that “Stewball Stu” was getting ready to race in a “chicken race” down at Olde Saco Beach the next day.

Willy showed up, by the way, wearing a red splash on most of his upper shoulder getting redder by the minute, and a grey face getting greyer. Finally he just collapsed under his own weight, asked for a pillow, or something to prop his head up, and a smoke (Camels, unfiltered, for the curious, a brand both men had been smoking since about eighth grade). Then he started talking, slow like he wanted it taken down in Jimmy’s brain just like it was coming out of his mouth, slow too because the life was draining out of him and slow was the only way he could have his say, have his peace say:

“It didn’t start out wrong, I don’t think. No more wrong that with any other woman that I ever ran around with. Maybe less so. I don’t have time to argue those fine points right now. But let me go back to the beginning, that first day when she came through Bill Bentley’s Cadillac up in Bar Harbor, the place I told you about and about us becoming partners at. The place where all the swells come for oil changes and tune-ups in the summer. Or have the million and one dents their kids, or their wives, put in that old Rolls, Buick, Lincoln or whatever they use to make up hell for dear old dad’s insurance premiums.”

“I had my head buried down looking at the engine block in Mr. Pepper’s Cadillac and when I pulled my head up there she was. Estelle Pepper, Mrs. Clarence Pepper, I found out later, ten minutes later when it was too late. Young, twenty something young, fresh as a daisy, dressed in white, summer white, shorts and blouse, wearing blonde hair, wearing long legs, wearing well, in the end wearing some jasmine perfume that took the all the hell out of the oil, gas, diesel, funk smell of that old garage. Yah, in the end it was that perfume that got to me, got to me bad.”

“But before the end, way before, it was that look that tiger hungry look that some women get when they are bored, lonely, or just being frisky, frisky with the hired help. That was the first look she gave me, and then she put on the smile, a faint ironic smile like brother, guess what, this is your lucky day and I am the prize smile. And I, I, just grinned”

“So we started, started the man-woman back and forth chatter, eyes blazing, and other stuff too, stuff that knew only one way to end, end in some dreamy outsized bedroom complete with outsized private bath, or some hotel, motel, no tell bed in some by the hour joint on Route One near the Ellsworth line. That’s when I found out she was Mrs. Clarence Pepper, the wife of the big New York stockbroker, and not as I had thought his daughter, his slumming daughter. Here in Bill Bentley’s to pick up the old family Caddy, and drive me to hell. Like I said by that time, by that hungry look, faint smile time it didn’t matter, matter at all, if she was married to five guys. Or fifty.”

Willy stopped for a minute to put out his cigarette, and ask for another.

“ So, naturally, after some more banter, a few smiles, and a couple of grins from me, I had to drive her home to make sure everything was alright with the vehicle. Drive her to Bar Harbor Estates where the Peppers held forth and had for generations. And before I knew it we were drinking heaven scotch, heaven Clarence Pepper- bought scotch, by the pitcher in her dreamy outsized bedroom with that outsized bath getting ready to muss up the sheets. Not a new story, no way, bored rich house wives, bored young housewives, looking for working stiff thrills have been doing this since they invented Bar Harbor, and not just Bar Harbor either.”

“Here is what was new though, new to me, some dames, yah, dames, just don’t know when they have it good. Estelle coming out of a from nowhere bracero, okie, arkie home in suburban California, and having done tours as a waitress serving them off the arm and fending off the truckers lined up to take shot at her, a lingerie model for guys looking for socks for their ever-loving wives, and a call girl (that is how and where they met at the Waldorf in New York City ) took Clarence’s offer of marriage (his third ) in a flash before he changed his mind, or died.

Yes, Estelle had this sweet set-up, old Clarence, accepted, or at least didn’t cry over her infidelities and trysts, and looking at any actuarial table in the year 1978 would show that the life expectancy of a seventy-three hard drinking, hard- smoking, hard- living man was short, short enough for a twenty something woman to wait out.”

“Could she wait? Hell, no. More importantly though once that jasmine got into, under, over, between my skin and made me skirt-crazy, no Estelle crazy, neither could I. See, she said she loved me, loved me like no other man, and could never love another man like that again. And she would nuzzle that jasmine scent right on my shoulder. Then she started, started slow at first, with little hints about what would happen if this or that happened to an engine, or this or that happened to the brakes, or this or that happened to the tires, until I got so crazy I just confronted her straight up and asked what she had in mind. Knowing, and she knowing that I knew, what she had in mind. She said it straight up, straight up like it was an everyday thought (and maybe it was), straight up no way to avoid the word, murder.”

“And all this jackass of a bum mechanic said was, ah, how are we going to do it. Yah, I had it bad, bad as a man can have it for a woman. She knew the answer before I finished asking when she “suggested” a loose valve while beloved Clarence was driving to his fuddy-duddy old golf course up in the hills toward Arcadia National Park. I said, that would not work, no way would we get away with that, no way. So I worked out a plan, a plan involving just the slightest pinprick in an engine line that would cause the fumes to come up in his face while driving causing him to conk out and, well, kill himself. Perfect, or perfect enough for what we had in mind”

“But see that is where the whole thing went awry, crazy. Clarence wasn’t such an old fool after all, or at least fool enough to our advantage. He never really did not accept Estelle’s affairs, he had her watched, had her followed, and in the end had me followed. And he never did drive that damn car. See he took it to Bill Bentley himself to have it inspected, thoroughly inspected.
Bill found that faint pinprick, really not so faint by the time he inspected it.”

“Knowing what had happened old Clarence devised a plan, a simple plan.
He invited Estelle and her companion, me, to his study for some before dinner drinks. Prior to this Estelle had been bugging me to devise another plan, a non-car plan. I had balked at any rough stuff though. We went into the giant dining room and made idle conversation. Then, after some banter about the weather, Estelle took out a gun, a .44 I think, and shot at one Clarence Pepper at point-blank range. And then one William Webb as well. I fell to the floor in shock.”

“Here is some advice, buddy. Never trust a woman with a gun. She totally missed Clarence even at point-blank range. And that was fatal, fatal for her. See Clarence, before Estelle messed up the play, also had planned to have a little shoot-out himself before dinner was served. And he won. Later when I woke up there was one Clarence Pepper standing over me ready to put a couple more in me. I gathered all my strength, pushed the old man away, opened the front door and got into my car and sped like hell here. End of story.”

Well not quite the end of the story. See Willy was the guy who tipped Bill Bentley off to the pinprick leak, and the guy who made it bigger, big enough so even Bill Bentley could see the damn thing. Willy, when the deal went down, jasmine-crazy or not, just couldn’t take the old guy’s life. Fool? Yes, fool maybe as he took out of his pocket a small handkerchief that Jimmy said smelled of jasmine, brought it to his nose and expired, expired with that grin, that grin on his face like he had when she first came in that garage door . And Clarence Pepper? Nothing happened to him but old age. See while Willy was out cold Clarence put the old six-shooter in his hand and the fingerprints found, at least the one’s that counted for the Bar Harbor coroner were Willy’s.

“Yah, he had it bad, six ways to Sunday bad, poor old Willy,” opined Jimmy Jacques. And Josh Lawrence agreed. Dames.

***In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night- Yeah, Crime Doesn’t Pay-So What- James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the early film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

DVD Review

The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, MGM, 1946

Yeah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he goes to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Yes, our boy, our never let your feet stand still for a minute on the road boy Frank (played by John Garfield) in the 1940s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s classic masterpiece crime noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, had it bad, bad as a man could have it. Bad a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora (played by a very, very blonde Lana Turner) walked through the Twin Oaks café door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she is nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for Frank to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy Frank. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.

See not only was Ms. Cora a Ms. but a real live 1940s Mrs. married to Nick, the owner of Twin Oaks. And Nick was nothing but an old guy, an old penny-pinching guy with small dreams getting smaller, whom Cora married on the rebound from, well, from something, something bad from the look of Nick. Yes, Nick was definitely nothing but a third party “has been” once the chemistry starts between Frank and Cora, starts to really get going as will often happen once you take those midnight swims in the white-flecked, our homeland the sea, pacific, Pacific Ocean just above slumming Los Angeles before the criss-cross roads took away many of the scenes. If Nick was smart he would watch his back very carefully because I smell murder in the air, hellish highway murder, once our sweet go-getter Cora coos to Frank that it is, and I quote, “the only way.” The only way to that white picket fence heaven old Nick is too cheap to buy her.

Needless to say, if you have read any of James M. Cain’s crime novels or short stories, there have to be a few twists and turns in the plot before the inevitable, and I mean inevitable in its fullest sense, road to perdition narrows and there is no escape from the grim fate that those who play with the fate sisters usually have to suffer. Here the inflamed lovers botch the first attempted murder of Nick but arouse so much suspicion from a very conveniently located neighboring District Attorney that they will not just get to go about their merry ways.

Moreover, have you been paying attention? Cora’s got her hooks in Frank so bad that you know there will be another attempt. And there was, and it was “successful.” And they got away with it after some nifty legal maneuvering that would do any modern defense attorney proud. Except you know as well as I do, and if you have ever read any previous crime noir review of mine, you damn well know that it can’t just be left like that. Crime, brothers and sisters, does not pay even for the mere legally not guilty. And that is where Frank’s smile, or half-smile, comes in. Because in the end he faces the chair not for Nick’s death, but for her’s. And all he cared about by then was whether she would in death forgive him. Yeah, our boy Frank had it bad, real bad and that is what makes this a classic crime noir, no question. But Frank don’t feel bad there are about three billion guys who have gone through those same hoops for a dame, including this writer, although I personally tend to sultry brunettes not blondes.