Billy Wilder (1944)
The source material is a James M Cain story, which involves a married woman and her lover planning to murder the woman’s husband: as soon as they’ve carried out the plan successfully, their relationship starts to fall apart. The basic components echo those of Cain’s best-known novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Double Indemnity (released two years before the first Hollywood version of Postman) is very much its own film and a deservedly famous one.
It’s a mark of the confidence of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, with whom Wilder wrote the screenplay, that they give away the plot immediately. A man, moving painfully and on crutches, comes to the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company at dead of night. He enters his office, sits down, turns on a dictaphone and speaks into it:
‘Office memorandum, Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager. Los Angeles, July 16th, 1938. I suppose you’ll call this a confession when you hear it. I don’t like the word confession. …’
Even though the lighting and music have already announced a crime thriller, the viewer, on hearing the word ‘confession’, doesn’t expect at such an early stage the kind of admission this turns out to be. The climax to the opening speech is:
‘Want to know who killed Dietrichson? Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance agent, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars … until a little while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?’
Neff (Fred MacMurray) then starts to relate the series of events leading up to his dictaphone disclosures (and the gunshot wound in his shoulder that explains his qualification of ‘no visible scars’). The opening revelations don’t detract at all from the tension and suspense of Double Indemnity. The developing relationship between Neff and ‘the woman’, the devising of their scheme to kill her husband, the aftermath to the crime – all are thoroughly fascinating.
There’s a good deal of Neff’s voiceover. Since much of this describes what Wilder is also showing on the screen, the narration might seem redundant; what’s more, the turn of phrase is decidedly literary, in the hardboiled prose style of Raymond Chandler. There’s no doubt this is in the script partly to show itself off yet it’s rarely surplus to requirements: the melancholy register in which Fred MacMurray tells the story often contrasts strikingly with the tone of the visuals that it accompanies. Besides, the words sometimes draw attention to details that images, even in a movie as expressive as this one, can’t easily show. When Neff visits the Dietrichson residence and meets Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) for the first time, the sultry atmosphere and the dialogue between them certainly convey the heat of the afternoon. Neff’s description of the room he’s ushered into, adds to the picture nevertheless:
‘… the sunshine coming in through the Venetian blinds showed up the dust in the air … They had a bowl of those little red goldfish on the table …’
Later on, when the principals’ situation has become seriously claustrophobic and the camera, as it crosses the room, observes the goldfish bowl, it resonates strongly with this earlier reference.
Double Indemnity is an early example of Hollywood film noir – so early that it predates the first critical use of the term (by Nino Frank, in 1946). It more fully deserves the label than later Wilder movies like Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole – not only because the source is a particular strain of American crime fiction but also because the noir look and the noir content of the story are in equilibrium. John Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography roots the characters – and the passions and frailties that impel their wrongdoing – in a sinister, hazardous world. Although it’s authentic noir, the film is also distinctive within the crime-movie genre. The killing of Dietrichson (Tom Powers) is planned, and suspicion that it’s a murder rather than the accident it appears to be harboured, not by a criminal mastermind and a shrewd sleuth but by the professional experience of two insurance men.
Neff’s initial call at the house is to remind Dietrichson that his car insurance is due for renewal. He’s not at home; his wife very much is. Their verbal exchanges are a wisecracking flirtation. On Neff’s return visit, with her husband again absent, Phyllis asks if it’s possible for her to take out an accident policy on her his life without his knowledge. Neff smells a rat, tells her as much and brusquely takes his leave. When she later turns up at his apartment, however, his sexual desire for Phyllis gets the better of his moral compass. He concocts a plan for them to kill her husband and make it appear that he has fallen accidentally from a moving train – a cause of death that will trigger the ‘double indemnity’ clause of the policy she’s taken out and pay out twice its face value. Neff tricks Dietrichson into signing the policy (in the belief that he’s signing for his car insurance renewal) and a blank cheque to pay for it.
Chandler and Wilder’s dialogue is often scintillating – especially the early, sexually charged sparring of Neff and Phyllis, and Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson)’s forensic destruction of the theory advanced by Pacific boss Norton (Richard Gaines) that Dietrichson may have committed suicide but made it look like an accident to secure the double indemnity payout for his widow. In terms of screen time, Edward G Robinson has only the third largest role but he gives the outstanding performance in the film. His increasing belief that Phyllis has plotted with A N Other to get rid of her husband is the latest instance of Keyes’s instincts telling him something that his brain then follows through. It’s a personified ‘gut feeling’ – pointing to his stomach, Keyes tells Neff repeatedly of the ‘little man’ who makes his presence felt there. Robinson underplays superbly: Barton Keyes is vividly entertaining but very real.
There are weaknesses. Double Indemnity may well be the highlight of Fred MacMurray’s career; beside Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck, MacMurray’s lack of brilliance works well as a contribution to the overall dramatic balance. But Walter Neff is the main part and MacMurray doesn’t get across much sense of how this hitherto decent man feels about what he’s getting himself into. In the smaller roles there’s enjoyable work from John Philliber, as the lift operator at the insurance company offices; and from Porter Hall, as Mr Jackson ‘from Medford, Oregon’, the unexpected and unwelcome train passenger whom Neff, pretending to be Dietrichson, encounters in the observation car of the train from which the victim supposedly falls. There are other poor, mechanical performers, though, notably Jean Heather, as Phyllis’s bitter stepdaughter Lola, and Richard Gaines as Norton. Although the main theme of Miklós Rózsa’s score provides a good ominous focus to the action, the music does go on – like someone who keeps talking even though no one is still listening.
Whereas the staging of the murder and the lovers’ attempt to disguise it as an accident is gripping, the climax to their final showdown feels phony. Phyllis, after shooting and wounding Neff, can’t finish him off and incredibly discovers she has a heart and loves him after all, just before he shoots her dead. The final scene isn’t false in the same way but it’s still somehow anti-climactic. Keyes, after arriving at the office for the last stages of the dictaphone monologue, finally bends to light a cigarette for the stricken Neff. This nicely reverses the pattern of what’s gone before: Neff has repeatedly supplied a light for his senior’s ‘cheap cigar’. The immediately preceding dialogue between them verges on sentimental, though. Keyes, says Neff, failed to work out the identity of Phyllis’s partner in crime because he was ‘too close, right across the desk from you’. Since we’ve already intuited his paternal affection for his younger colleague, it’s almost unnecessary for Keyes now to reply ’closer than that, Walter’. Edward G Robinson is so fine, and Keyes such an astute detective, you feel almost cheated that the claims manager didn’t work out who the culprit was and Robinson didn’t get an opportunity to show him trying to come to terms with that.
The role of Phyllis Dietrichson is one of Barbara Stanwyck’s most famous. It wouldn’t be wrong to call it iconic because Stanwyck creates a memorable image, though it’s by no means a static one. Watch, for example, the nervy movement of the little finger of one of hand as Phyllis talks, the way she then brings the hand up to do a quick check of her dark nail varnish. Marvel at her attitude – an expectant slouch – as she sits in an armchair. Manny Farber thought that Stanwyck’s ‘brand of sulky, cold aloofness doesn’t seem big enough’. Although I disagree, she does seem less comfortable than usual inside the skin of tarty, disgruntled Phyllis. This may be because the woman is dislikeable, more likely (I’m inclined to think) because she’s always aware that Phyllis, in spite of the splendid repartee and the individualising physical details (a gold anklet, pompom slippers), is essentially a generic femme fatale. Even so, she delivers the most powerful single moment of Double Indemnity. Neff, hiding in the back seat of the Dietrichsons’ car, which Phyllis is driving, strangles her husband out of shot. Billy Wilder wisely concentrates on the startling look of contained excitement on Barbara Stanwyck’s face.
22 February 2019
