Noir's Big Break:

No discussion of film noir is complete without Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity. Not because it was the first, although the assemblers of this year's two-disc "signature series" reissue try to make a case for that - actually, the beginnings of the genre can be traced all the way back to John Huston's The Maltese Falcon in 1941, if not even earlier, to a brief mini-tradition of American B-films stemming roughly from the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But what does make Double Indemnity so historically significant - and what the talking heads on this DVD set do get right - is its placement as one of the first truly influential films noir, and certainly the most explicit execution of that style's essential narrative and visual elements to date. Double Indemnity's release in 1944 puts it ahead of the crop of 1945 films which caused French critics to originally coin the phrase "film noir"; and its success, netting seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, paved the way for a new period of studio-backed mainstream credibility in the genre, allowing for a brilliant, if short-lived, run of similarly-themed films in the post-war era.

The fact that it happens to be a fantastic movie doesn't hurt, either. Double Indemnity is perhaps the archetypal noir, not least because of its story - a product of not one, but two notable hardboiled fiction writers, with Raymond Chandler helping Wilder to adapt the script from a novella by James M. Cain. Chandler had written The Big Sleep, itself adapted into a classic noir by Howard Hawks in 1946; Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice was given the Hollywood treatment in 1946 as well, with Lana Turner in the starring role. The talents of both authors are evident in Double Indemnity's sharply-honed plot: an oil man's scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces a hardbitten insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray), convincing him to help murder her husband and collect on a fraudulent accident insurance claim, the "double indemnity" clause of which provides the film's title. It's a scenario one can virtually recite by heart, even without having seen the movie; not only can its themes of betrayal and adultery, lust, guilt and murder, be found as far back as Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, but Indemnity itself has been recycled and parodied ad nauseum in the 62 years since its release (most bizarrely in a subplot of 1993's Wayne's World 2 featuring Garth and a vampish Kim Basinger). Of all these tellings, however, Wilder's is still the best. Along with Chandler (and, of course, the source material of Cain's original story), he turns this simple plot into a tautly-paced meditation on the potential for evil in the human heart.


And he does it with a truly masterful example of post-Citizen Kane studio filmmaking. Cinematographer and frequent Wilder collaborator John F. Seitz plays the expressionistic, low-key lighting that defines noir to the hilt, wrapping the illicit lovers in moody pitch-darkness, throwing silhouettes of Venetian blinds against the walls like prison bars, and making the shadow of MacMurray's Walter Neff loom over his actual body like a projection of his sin-blackened soul. Pure and simple, Double Indemnity just looks like a film noir, a true textbook example. It's a film that oozes attitude from its opening shot to its indelible close, and the way Wilder and Seitz use externalized visuals to illustrate their characters' warped internal psychology is sublime.

Also sublime is the work by the film's three principal actors: MacMurray, Stanwyck, and not least, Edward G. Robinson as the pursuing "doctor, bloodhound, cop, judge, jury, and father confessor all in one" claims agent Barton Keyes. Robinson's as great a character actor as ever, making up for what his part lacks in nuance with an energetic, wiseass performance that simultaneously sends up his star-making 1930s gangster roles and expands on them. MacMurray's solid too, his sleazy, cynical, fast-talking Neff a must-see for anyone who knows him only as The Absent-Minded Professor and the pipe-smoking patriarch on My Three Sons. But Stanwyck is the real show-stealer here: as the murderess Phyllis Dietrichson, she defines the term "femme fatale," alternating between "feminine" romantic and emotional displays of ambiguous authenticity and a kind of vacant inhumanity that's chilling to behold. Just the shot of her cold-blooded expression as Neff strangles her husband in the car seat beside her would be enough to make this an iconic performance. Add to that her first appearance, wearing nothing but a towel, an anklet and an infamously cheap blonde wig - about as sexy as you could get away with in the days of the Production Code - and is there any surprise that one of those other six Oscar nods went to Miss Stanwyck?


In all, however, Double Indemnity succeeds so utterly because it knows how to sell its theme. Like most films noir, Indemnity is about moral ambiguity, the blurring of the lines between those "good guys" and "bad guys" who had become grist for the typical crime film's mill. Unlike most noirs, though, these characters aren't corrupt cops or antiheroic robbers - they're just regular people, insurance salesmen and trophy wives. And while Wilder confessed a stylistic debt to the early thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock in the making of Double Indemnity, the difference between his approach and Hitch's is also vital: where the antagonizing forces in films like The Lady Vanishes or The 39 Steps came in the form of vaguely malevolent, seemingly omnipotent syndicates - a clear metaphor for Europe's wartime paranoia - in Double Indemnity the dangers come, hauntingly, from within ourselves. Granted, maybe it's a little far-fetched that a mere attraction for an anklet-wearing, half-naked Barbara Stanwyck, however fatal, could drive such an average man into a web of murder and deceit; but then again, this film was made at a time when an entire nation of "average people" allowed a horror like the Holocaust to happen.

The great message that Double Indemnity has to share may not be unique - how many other stories, from the Bible on down, have warned of man's capacity for temptation and evil? - but it's not one you're likely to forget. "I killed him for money, for a woman," Walter Neff confesses at the beginning of the film. Sure, he did. And even now, over a half century later, are there any temptations more valid than these?

The new DVD release of Double Indemnity boasts a digitally remastered picture, in addition to a documentary featurette, two commentary tracks (by film historian Richard Schickel and historian/screenwriter Lem Dobbs and historian Nick Redman, respectively), and the 1973 made-for-TV remake in its entirety. The documentary has some interesting tidbits about the making of the film, and the commentaries, particularly the one by Dobbs and Redman, are worth a look; the TV movie, on the other hand, can best be advertised as a historical curiousity.

Seemingly influenced more by 1970s soap operas than by the original film's pioneering noir style, the 1973 Indemnity fails to add anything to the story's legacy; it's a virtually shot-by-shot, if mercifully truncated remake, with none of the impact of Wilder's and Seitz' stunning black-and-white cinematography. Indeed, its opulent, sun-filled shots of commercialized Los Angeles could be said to take on a strange meaning of their own, suggesting that the sordid crimes of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson may be placed just as easily in an empty, blatantly consumerist facade as in the darkened corners and dimly-lit apartments of the original. The terminal blandness of the cast and director Jack Smight alike, however, are enough to prove that this latent commentary was unintentional. Samantha Eggar as Phyllis lacks Stanwyck's sensuality and cold edge in equal proportions, while Richard Crenna plays Neff like the naive patsy MacMurray never allowed him to be. Even Lee J. Cobb, who fares best as Keyes, interprets the character without an iota of the energy and likeability Robinson brought to the role.

In all, if you're a fan of Brady Bunch-style production design and '70s kitsch, this remake might be your ticket; but if you just want to experience the original film, looking without a doubt better than it's looked since its original release, don't bother taking that second disc out of the case. Wilder said it best: "they didn't get it right."

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See Also: Edward Norton...as Edward S. Norton! It's brilliant!