Double indemnity (spine 1126)

Double Indemnity
Directed by: Billy Wilder
1944
Spine #1126

What is it about old movies that makes the craft look so damn easy? Double Indemnity was released almost 80 years ago, yet remains the gold standard for cinematic noir. From the moment Fred MacMurray’s slick insurance salesman Walter Neff arrives at the Los Feliz home of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the plotting and dialogue flow so effortlessly, it’s almost as if the script is writing itself (in actuality it was courtesy of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler - not exactly a shabby duo when it comes to this sort of thing).

Neff is only there to remind Mr. Dietrichson to renew his auto insurance… but instead fatefully crosses paths with his wife, a blonde Venus flytrap in heels, who innocently inquires about the possibility of purchasing accident insurance for her husband without his knowledge. Neff sees straight through her, but for all his bluster, he’s smitten (“I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, the one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now, to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea and everything that went with it”)… and before long he’s helping her plot the perfect murder. One that involves Dietrichson meeting his unfortunate demise on a train, thereby triggering his policy’s “double indemnity” clause, which means twice the payout.

Not surprisingly, things don’t go according to plan. In fact, that’s never even in question, given Wilder’s bold decision to open the film with a gravely injured Neff staggering into the insurance office and recording his confession into a dictaphone as the story’s framing device. As good as the two leads are, the best performance might be courtesy of the man Neff’s confessing to - his boss, Barton Keyes, an insurance biz bloodhound played by the great Edward G. Robinson, who starts to pick at the threads of Neff’s ingenious plot (laying out the risk of two people committing 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 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.” Lord, who writes dialogue like this anymore?).

Younger audiences, of course, might question the fuss (admittedly not all the dialogue is quite so ageless - if you took a shot every time Neff calls Phyllis “baby,” you’d be under the table within ten minutes). Double Indemnity portended the sort of stark cynicism that would flower in the coming postwar years, but there have certainly been darker and nastier examples of film noir. Likewise there have been more physically striking, more cold-blooded, more casually cruel, and more just plain hazardous-to-your-health femme fatales than Stanwyck over the years, but she - like the film itself - is the measuring stick (one thing that never was topped, however, is the cunning intelligence that glitters in Stanwyck’s eyes in each and every shot she’s in - in an industry that often favors girls, she’s most definitely a woman).

And hey - Fred MacMurray’s pretty darn good too. For a movie about sordid subjects such as murder and fatalism, Double Indemnity - with its classic, black-and-white compositions and exterior shots of a 1940s Los Angeles that feels like the stuff of myth - is strangely comforting… the sort of movie you want to envelop yourself in, like the clouds of cigarette smoke that fill the screen. It makes Phyllis commenting “We’re both rotten,” to which Neff responds “Only you’re a little more rotten” almost feel downright romantic.