Dietrichson arises at their first meeting in her living room while the head of the house (Neff’s client) is not at home. A gas chamber scene was, in fact, filmed but dropped from the final cut except for still photos, it has been, to date, not recovered. The line is repeated several times by the pair and delivered ironically given at the end by boss Keyes, who uses it as a metaphor for the cemetery. Very few movies can hold an audience in suspense if they already know how the story ends-Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 is a good example of a rule-proving exception.Ī few allusions to the death penalty give the viewer quiet little reminders of what the diabolical duo risk by going through with it-“straight down to the end of the line,” as the wife, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), puts it. Wilder and Chandler construct a voiceover flashback to the future. Throughout Double Indemnity, we’re in thrall from beginning to end, attentive to every detail of each scene, waiting to see what misstep or discovery will trigger the deadly collapse of the whole conspiracy.
We know the whole thing goes down in flames, but we don’t know when or why.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY ANALYSIS MALE FATALE FULL
Would-be lover and co-conspirator Walter Neff (a grim-faced Fred MacMurray) makes a full after-hours confession into his Dicta-phone, and yet we stayed riveted nonetheless. A successful insurance salesman falls for the wife of one of his clients and eventually agrees to participate in killing him in such a way that triggers a double indemnity clause in the policy (the widow gets twice the pay-out if the client dies in any of the narrow, highly unlikely, ways).īecause it’s noir and not straight drama, things go terribly, irredeemably wrong.ĭouble Indemnity breaks one of the cardinal rules of story-telling-we know the final outcome in the first seven minutes.
Cain novella to the big screen, Wilder brought in Raymond Chandler, the famous hardboiled writer known for his rat-a-tat dialogue and brilliant use of subtext (Chandler’s most famous creation was detective Philip Marlowe). To help bring the popular serialized James M. Some film historians say the genre began with the Wilder film, although, as William Park points out in his definitive study, What Is Film Noir?, the term wasn’t much in circulation prior to the 1970s anyway. But director Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) uniquely typifies film noir and provides an enduring ideal for filmmakers.
The film noir genre is on dark, velvety display in such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (adapted in seven different films since 1946).