The Car Man (Bourne) opera. I didn't even know it that well, and I still don't know it that well, to be honest. I know there are parallels, but it was more the feeling of the music and the feeling of what we all know Carmen to be." The story is loosely based on the 1934 novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by American novelist James M. Cain (1892–1977) and the 1946 and 1981 films of the same name respectively starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, and Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. In the films, Frank, a drifter, stops at a rural California diner
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