Jack Nicholson’s most unfairly treated movie: “People are anxious to disqualify it”
When you’re a legend in your own time like Jack Nicholson, you can basically work with any director you want.
Throughout his career, he ticked some of the most famous filmmakers in the world off his personal bucket list: Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, you name it, he’s been in one of their movies. However, the title of his most prolific collaborator belongs to a name you might not recognise.
Bob Rafelson directed the screen legend in six different movies over the course of 29 years, their first feature together was the 1968 psychedelic fever dream Head, an attempt by The Monkees to emulate the big screen success of The Beatles.
It did not end well, but then the pair went on to make Five Easy Pieces, which yielded Nicholson his first of eight ‘Best Actor’ Oscar nominations. The pair achieved plenty of success together, but not everything they touched turned to gold.
In an interview with Film Comment, the actor was forced to defend his most frequent boss, where, when Rafelson was charged with not being financially viable, he pushed back, citing one of their combined works as an example to the contrary.
“If you ran a question through this industry about The Postman Always Rings Twice, most people would surmise that it wasn’t successful,” he said, “That is not true. I know it made money, because I received overages, so it must’ve grossed about as much as Chinatown and much more than Carnal Knowledge. But people are anxious to disqualify it.”
Released in 1981, The Postman Always Rings Twice is the fourth big-screen adaptation of a novel by legendary crime writer James M Cain, which is also noteworthy for being the first film script written by the legendary David Mamet. It finds Nicholson plays a working-class nomad who finds work at a diner in Los Angeles, where he falls in love with Jessica Lange’s Cora, who runs the place with her rich husband Nick, played by John Colicos. Together, the pair conspire to murder Nick, inherit his fortune, and start a new life, but unfortunately, critics at the time felt that this remake brought nothing new to the story. Lana Turner, who’d starred in a version released in 1946, claimed that this new take was “pornographic trash” and refused to watch it.
The quality of the movie is one thing, but Nicholson was more concerned in that interview with its box office returns. On a budget of just $12million, that’s $42.5m in 2026 money, The Postman Always Rings Twice made $44.2m, which is $156.5m by modern standards, and that’s not bad at all. Given the conventional wisdom that a movie needs to double its initial budget to break even, the film most certainly turned a profit, and over time, critics would even soften their view on the project, so it seems like this was a victory all around.
Nicholson and Rafelson didn’t always get on, but it’s nice to know that they stood up for each other when it mattered most, and the pair would go on to make two more movies together before the latter passed away in 2022 at the age of 89.
