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ell with an'open shirt, holding a cigarette, looms next to the caption: “Dick Powell ... Different, Greater than Ever ... in a new Characterization!” RKO’s press book publicity headline screamed: “Dick Powell Wins Red-Blooded Role.” Yet unlike earlier detectives such as Sam Spade, RKO’s new private detective was publicized as “morę often wrong than right and does-n’t get on the real track until near the end. Furthermore, when it comes to actual physical contact with his enemies, he gets badly beaten up” (much like troops on the front linę). However, ads did not mention Chandler, his Farewell, My Lovely book, or the detective Philip Marlowe character. Instead, RKOis focus was weapons and women, not necessarily in that order. On February 17 Liberty magazine featured the tagline, “Forget that look in her eyes ... she’s got murder in her heart,” describing the film as a shady “murder-mystery.” By March 3, suggesting Hollywood’s growing propen-sity for crime, Collier’s ran a similar ad: “rough! tough! terrific! Sensa-tional is the word for the new Dick Powell! Hardboiled, Two-Fisted, he Folio ws a Trail of Violence, Blackmail and Murder ... in this new kind of Red-Blooded Mystery!” Beside the blaring headline, a rugged unkempt Powell wears a fedora and holds a gun, targeting the detective market while simulating combat. Trevor leans twisting on a sofa with an open (un)dress-ing robę exposing abundant legs and her erotic bikini brassiere. By April a plethora of detective and screen magazines ran ads with the tagline “Trou-ble ahead, Mister! That Fellow who Hired You to Find His Woman Won’t Stop^at Murder ... if you Don’t Deliver! Neither will She ... if you Do!” (Ads suggested the film’s adulterous love triangle with Shirleys smaller headshot, in the lower corner, looking up at Powells dominating virile image.)⁵⁹ Murder, My Sweet was a sensation. The modestly budgeted film earned $1,150,000 domestically and $565,000 overseas, totaling $1,715,000— and a sweet $597,000 profit for RKO.⁶⁰ On the heels of Double lndemnity, Murder, My Sweet reinforced the red-meat crime trend, as Cain and Chan-dler’s fiction became lucrative and popular in wartime 1940S Hollywood. As the success of these films became known in the industry, another studio reassessed its hard-boiled holdings with interest: MGM owned Cain’s most scandalous story, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Censorship, Red Meat, and The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, like Double lndemnity, was another example of a 1930S novel that the Production Codę censors would not touch but later endorsed during World War II, when conditions were morę appropriate. These potentially scandalous stories were reacti-vated as a cycle of dark film adaptations when it was institutionally viable

Censorship and the “Red Meat” Crime Cycle

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and profitable. But even if censors’ resistance subsided, the film cycle itself caused controversy. The Postman Always Rings Twice (produced in 1944-45 but not released until 1946) could not be produced in the same way that Double lndemnity had been—MGM had to visually lighten it up, whitewash it, and sanitize it. These wartime crime films were indicative of Hollywoods new tendency toward film noir, which developed in relation to industry censorship during the 1940S. Paradoxically, film noir both complied with, yet undermined, PCA censorship. While a darker wartime economic and cultural environment informed the production context of this influential film noir, Cain’s provocative crime-and-passion tale, banned by censors sińce its sale to MGM in 1934, would not have been deemed appropriate by this grand and conservative studio had Double lndemnity not set an industry precedent in navigating around the PCA, overturning Breen’s ban, and becoming a profitable sensation.⁶¹ In a sense MGM’s project was a seąuel effort respbnding to the success of Cain’s initial screen adaptation. Follow-ing the August-September 1944 release of Double lndemnity, by November 19,1944, the New York Times reported, “Last week’s high mark in the ‘red meat’ trend was the disclosure that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer intends to co-star John Garfield and Lana Turner iń Mr. Cain’s ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice.’ The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio^ archives until now because (to use a favored Hollywood expression) of Metro’s ‘inability to clean it up.”’ Industry analysts observed: “Closer to the cameras is another of Mr. Cain’s novels, ‘Mildred Pierce’... scheduled to go into production this week at Warner Brothers ... reported to be ne-gotiating for the author’s ‘Serenade.’ The ścreen version of Raymond Chan-dler’s ‘The Big Sleep,’ in production at Warners, is said to be another exam-ple of ingenuity in treating of psychopathic and physiological matters.”⁶² The PCA’s endorsement of Cain’s Double lndemnity, and the film’s com-mercial success, actually motivated a proper representational context for The Postman Always Rings Twice and other hard-boiled adaptations.

Cain had written Bar-B-Q at the peak of the Depression, during the Bank Holiday in March 1933, after losing his screenwriting job at Columbia Studio. He finished the story in September.⁶³ By January 1934 advance gal-leys of the book were sent to the studios, who were very interested. Alfred Rnopf published the book as The Postman Always Rings Twice in February. This hard-boiled novel, Cain’s first, established his trademark terse, first-person narration and tight plot, entangling sex, money, and violence. It was a story of a young drifter who has an affair with an unhappily married woman and then conspires with her to murder her husband so the two can run off together. This narrative formula was morę than a bit scandalous