The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 film) filmed as "Le Dernier Tournant" ("The Last Turning") in France in 1939 and as "Ossessione" ("Obsession") in Italy in 1943. Frank Chambers (John Garfield) is a hobo who has hitched a ride with a man we later comes to learn is the local District Attorney, Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames). He drops Frank off at a rural diner/service station, Twin Oaks, for a meal. Frank ends up working there. The diner is operated by a beautiful young woman, Cora Smith (Lana Turner), and her much older husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway). Frank and Cora start to have an affair soon after they
Lana Turner as an actress has divided critics: Upon Turner's death, John Updike wrote in "The New Yorker" that she "was a faded period piece, an old-fashioned glamour queen whose fifty-four films, over four decades didn't amount, retrospectively to much ... As a performer, she was purely a studio-made product." Defenders of Turner's acting ability, such as Jessica Hope Jordan and James Robert Parish, cite her performance in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" as an argument for the value of her work. Her role in the film has also resulted in her being frequently associated with film noir and the femme fatale