"Double Indemnity" (1944)

"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.