#221: Double Indemnity
Film noir codifier one of the best examples of it
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 30, 2020.
Initial release: July 6, 1944
Director: Billy Wilder
Los Angeles, July 1938. It’s late. A man drives erratically to the insurance office building where he works, eventually stumbling into the office of his colleague. From there he picks up a dictaphone and starts telling his story, a story of infidelity, murder, and paranoia.
Film noir isn’t so much a genre as it’s an aesthetic, a mindset, a look and feel. Rooted in the grim post-World War I fashion of German Expressionism, a good noir always rates high on visual style, and much of that is due to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.
And so we flash back to the spring of 1938, when our protagonist went to visit a client about renewing some auto policies. After meeting the client’s wife — who initially appears to him in a bathrobe — he’s quickly infatuated with her, and she him, but he has work to do. She soon makes it clear that she’s not at all happy with her marriage, and makes vague hints as to wanting her husband dead — by an accident, or perhaps an “accident.” Our hero is at first put off by this, but soon enough the little wiggle of an awful idea begins to work on him.
He’s an insurance agent and has been for 11 years. He knows how insurance works. He knows what they’d look for. He figures he can set it up to make it look like an honest accident — and use a double indemnity clause to double the payout. He’s got it all set up. Everything goes off without a hitch — the murder, the disposal, the alibi. Of course, as is often the case, things start to go wrong almost immediately, and before long, the whole plan begins to unravel as these two torrid lovers soon become suspicious of one another.
While we can look back on German works like M and The Hands of Orlac as early examples of film noir, or to the British Alfred Hitchcock with films like The Lodger, the official “classic era” of film noir is a quintessentially American post-war movement between from the mid 1940s through the 1950s. At that time, Hollywood was still under the strict censorship regime of the Hays code, and the office that made the final call on what was acceptable to put to film. A large part of film noir’s air of mystery boils down to the restrictions called for by the code. Double Indemnity is one of the best examples of film noir’s oppositional relationship to Hollywood censorship. We can trace the root of the story, through the original novella by James m. Cain, to the infamous case of Ruth Snyder — who along with her boyfriend murdered her husband to collect on insurance. In the end she and her boyfriend were caught and imprisoned, and she became the first woman to sit in the electric chair at Sing Sing in almost 30 years — with her execution being surreptitiously photographed by a journalist with a hidden camera. The whole story is quite sordid, which is why in the mid-1930s — the early years of the Code’s enforcement — the Hays office killed any chance of a studio picking it up for a film adaptation. It wouldn’t be for another 8 years that the idea would be revisited. However, hollywood was already chafing under the code, and after the Hays office denied the story a second time, Paramount decided to film it anyway with a script by crime novel virtuoso Raymond Chandler himself, ultimately with only a few changes. What eventually wound up on the silver screen would become one of the most important films in Hollywood history, a film that pushed the boundaries of what Hollywood leadership deemed acceptable, and set the standard for film noir for the next fifteen years.
Billy Wilder has crafted a visually arresting film that embodies nearly all the common traits of a good, old-school film noir. Venetian blinds cast moody shadows reminiscent of prison bars, unconventional framing gives a creepy, unbalanced vibe, and the script is sharp and snappy. The lead characters ooze that kind of middle class sleaze that film noir is so well known for; Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff the insurance agent is a sharp tack whose scruples only go so far; Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson is cheap and rotten, with lousy taste to match. Opposite them is Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, a brilliant claims adjuster who can spot a phony claim a mile away, and because he lies awake at night wondering what’s off about this insurance claim, so too does Neff lie awake at night, wondering if Keyes’ll figure it out. Los Angeles is as much a character in this film as the cast. At night it’s dark and moody, a true noir setting that we’re all familiar with, rain coming down at just the right time. But even when the sun comes out, all it does is cast long shadows.
While noir is not and has never been wholly the domain of American film — indeed, it’s not even really the domain of film as a medium anymore — the “classic era” is without a doubt an expression of the American condition in the years following the war. The late 1940s and 1950s are often held up as a joyful time of prosperity, but it was also a time of transition, of paranoia and fear. Cities were getting bigger. Lives were moving faster. The Cold War was revving up. Technology was advancing faster than anyone could keep up with. Film noir is inherently an expression of that anxiety, following in the footsteps of 1930s gangster films, when the criminals stopped looking like Snidely Whiplash and started looking like ordinary people you would meet every day on the street. The whole point of noir in the classic era was to expose the seedy underbelly, to show just how darkly human we were in an age of white picket fences and dinner on the table at 5 o’clock. An ordinary insurance salesman and a bored houswife: what could go wrong?
