Ron Peters's Reviews > The Postman Always Rings Twice

To some degree, Postman is a logical extension of the “Lost Generation” works of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald. The miseries of World War One and the Great Depression tended to break down established social values and grow the divide between rich and poor. But where poverty and hardship brought out the best in Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), it only bred a pair of sadomasochistic psychopaths in Postman.

As fiction, Postman is a non-nutritive time filler, a literary hamburger helper. It is pure action adventure, populated with cardboard characters that never grow or change. Even that is fine as far as it goes. It is what it is: 100% fast-paced entertainment, 0% art. But that the sole purposes Cain could imagine putting this to were misogyny and murder for money leaves me cold.