It nearly slipped our attention.
Thanks to an article by Terry Teachout, theater critic of The Wall Street Journal, it didn’t.
Please join us in which a Happy 75th Birthday to Double Indemnity, which first reached theaters in 1944 — to lukewarm reviews, sad to note — and set a mark of sorts for ensuing film noir dramas. In its time, another underappreciated classic.
The film would later be acknowledged by critics and scholars as the first fully developed example of film noir in which a flawed but basically innocent protagonist is presented with a moral choice, makes the wrong call, and is plunged into a violent after-hours world of passion and crime, writes Teachout.
Noir film scholar Eddie Muller notes that the movie’s first person narration, relating the entire story in flashbacks, became a standard film device (although it was never equalled). Double Indemnity also marked a radical career shift by director Billy Wilder away from the romantic comedies he had been churning out with working partner Charles Brackett, who declined to join Wilder in the crime drama.
As a result, Wilder was forced to work on the script with crime novelist Raymond Chandler, who adapted the script from a 1936 novella written by James M. Cain. Despite the fact that Wilder and Chandler disliked each other, their uneasy collaboration yielded seven Oscar nominations.
Fred MacMurray (later the sitcom dad of tv’s My Three Sons) plays Walter Neff, a glib insurance salesman who falls hard for Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, a been-around-the-block-several times dame who lures Neff into a scheme to murder her husband and pocket the insurance money.
MacMurray and Stanwyck make for a smoldering couple, whose sexual sparks are suggested but, given the time, never spelled out. Phyllis: We’re both rotten. Walter: Only you’re a little more rotten.
Edward G. Robinson give a typically impressive performance as the insurance company honcho, who never sees that the young man man (Walter) he mentors is the actual killer. Walter’s dying words are that he was always “too close, right across the desk.” Responds the heartbroken insurance exec — Closer than that, Walter.
Wilder would sometimes describe his film as a love story between two men.
We’ll give Teachout the final word: ‘Double Indemnity’ (is) a pop-culture masterpiece exemplary of the very best that golden-age Hollywood had to offer.
Long ago I heard a great trivia question plucked from “Double Indemnity.” “What was the song wafting through the air from the neighbor’s radio as Walter and Phyllis began their final scene together?” Answer: “Tangerine.” What a beautifully selected piece of (Paramount-owned) music. Wistful, yearning, and forever after quietly menacing. The perfect piece to sum up their relationship as they began their dance of death.
What a great movie. In a town filled with talent, Billy Wilder really was several cuts above.
So at least two of the greatest “L.A.” movies ever made, Double Indemnity and Chinatown, were directed by emigres. Probably more. I’ll have to look that up.
May I mention another unheralded character actor who shows up in Double Indemnity. Richard Gaines, in a great piece of work as the insurance company exec whose biggest adversary is Edward G. Robinson’s “Keyes”. Gaines assayed stuffed shirts and clueless upper crust types very well.
In three short years he had meaty roles in The More the Merrier, Double Indemnity and The Enchanted Cottage. He was in a lot of good stuff.
Side note–Gaines and wife Brenda Marshall were the great-grandparents of the recent Gilroy Festival killer. Who knows what leads to what in this life.
Cheers to “Double Indemnity,” the essence of noir ambiguity.