"Double Indemnity" (1944), directed by Billy
Wilder, 5 stars
“They’ve committed a murder.
It’s not like taking a trolley-ride together where they can get off at
different stops. They’re stuck with each
other, and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line, and it’s a
one-way trip, and the last stop is the cemetery” – Barton Keyes, Claims Manager
"Double Indemnity" is one of the best examples of 1940s film noir and stands at 29 in the American Film Institute's 10th
anniversary listing of the top 100 American films of all time. Fred MacMurray plays
Walter Neff, a top-of-his-game insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck
plays Phyllis Dietrichson, the slinky wife of a client whose auto policy has
come due. It's lust at first sight, and the two fairly quickly concoct a
scheme for killing the husband and cleaning up on his accident insurance
policy. If he dies on a train, an actuarial improbability, the policy pays double (hence the title),
so that's the plan. The story is loosely based on a real murder committed by Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray in 1927.
MacMurray, best remembered for his later forays into Disney
comedies (e.g., "The Shaggy Dog" and "The Absent-Minded
Professor") and for the iconic and extremely long-running sitcom, "My
Three Sons," was equally adept over a decade earlier adopting the
necessary hard-boiled persona he exudes in this film. As the murder plot
unravels, so does he, but to outward appearances, he remains cool, calm, and
collected.
The plot unfolds as a series of first-person narratives
spoken into a Dictaphone in the office of Neff's colleague, Barton Keyes
(Edward G. Robinson in, perhaps, his very best role). Neff appears to have
been shot in the shoulder, and each time an episode ends and cross-fades back to him, the spot
of blood on his coat grows larger. The narration is filled with tough-guy
colloquialisms and sparks fly in the banter between Neff and Phyllis. And
well they should. The screenplay was written by Raymond Chandler based on
a 1936 novel by James M. Cain. This duo along with Dashiell Hammett were
the masters of the genre in literary form and are variously responsible for
other cinematic and literary pulp classics such as "The Maltese
Falcon," "Out of the Past," "The Postman Only Rings
Twice," "Murder My Sweet," and "The Big Sleep."
And then there's relative newcomer to directing, Billy Wilder, whose
"Sunset Boulevard" a few years later takes first-person narrative to a whole new level,
putting words into the mouth not of a man who is dying, but one who is dead
before the film begins. "Double Indemnity" is an early example
of what the French would later dub "film noir." Its fatalism
prefigures the post-World War II cycle that would become pervasive until the
McCarthy witch hunters weighed in and laid waste much of the pool of talent
responsible for identifying and illuminating the darker corners of American
life.