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double indemnity
I’ve seen a number of Billy Wilder’s movies, but for no particular reason I’d never seen this one. I’ve always wanted to, and today, trying to come up with something to occupy my time — it’s been a quiet post-Thanksgiving day, too little to do, too much time to while away — I decided I’d finally cross this one off my list. Wilder’s a a writer-director I’ve always admired; his movies are always smart and snappily-dressed, and they treat you as if you’re the same.
The movie was co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and the pairing is one of the best of the era. (This, despite the two men being completely at odds with each other throughout production, with Chandler arriving on-set drunk and ultimately storming off-set and sending a list of demands to the studio with orders that they be met, or he would never return.) Wilder’s sets are gorgeously shot, filled with lush shadows and crisp whites. The smallest details are attended to. But Chandler’s signature narrative style rolls a layer of micro-detail over the film, sharpening the atmosphere with his observations. An early example: After the dialogue quoted at the beginning of this review. Fred MacMurray strolls somewhat cockily into the Dietrichson’s living room. It’s a well-to-do sort of room, with expensive lampshades and ornate picture frames, antique chairs and heavy curtains. It’s here that the narration kicks in:
There’s always more going on in a Wilder film than you see onscreen, and usually he’s content to hint at it, let you tug at it a bit, pull it free on your own. This is a different, perhaps more obvious, but very interesting approach. You don’t see the dust hanging in the sunbeams while MacMurray wanders through them, but once he’s described it, you imagine it, and this ordinary scene becomes just a little deeper for it.
MacMurray’s an overlooked treasure. Too easy it is to forget that he had a dramatic streak in him; too easy to lose it in the wake of his later comedies like The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-minded Professor, his eighty-nine episodes of “My Three Sons”. He plays Neff as a likeable fellow, on the surface, but internally, revealed through his narration, Neff is a brooding sort, a man who dares once to ache for something, and dares again to do something about it, and too late sees the doomed path he’s been set upon.
Stanwyck, disproportionately-assembled as she may seem, is compelling from her first appearance in the movie, in a towel on the balcony, just in from sunbathing. From the moment she sees Neff, she is eager to pick his brain for any clue to the working mechanisms of her own life. Her husband keeps everything from her, and she can barely contain her excitement to learn anything new in his absence. Compelling, this beginning, but over the course of the movie she deteriorates into little more than an errand girl, and her grand reveal in the third act falls a little short. Alongside MacMurray, she’s as thin as the man who plays the insurance firm’s president. (And boy, he’s bad.) The two leads have a terrific chemistry in the first two acts, one that reminds me of that echoed fifty years later by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, and one cemented by this exchange during their first meeting. Mrs. Dietrichson has been listening to Mr. Neff’s sales pitch, and she asks him to return the following evening, when her husband will be home. Neff would much rather be talking to her, and says as much.
But as the movie moves into riskier territory — the plotting of the murder, the deconstruction of the truth — the two characters feel ever distant from each other. They have quickly pledged their love to one another, but do they really feel these things for each other, or are games being played? Mrs. Dietrichson’s motivation is plainly visible — she is married to a disappointing rich man, one who is probably not as rich as she thought, and who she claims strikes her when drunk — but the depths of her manipulations never seem to end, as her past unravels. Walter Neff, on the other hand: what is his motivation? He obviously is attracted to the dangerous wife, but seems to live a contented life, with job security, a pleasant home in a nice building, a wise father figure for a boss. What does this new escapade gain him? And why doesn’t he foresee the ending it promises? He’s not a stupid man. He really should know better than this.
The movie’s other significant character is Barton Keyes, played by the gruff-looking but soft-hearted Edward G. Robinson. Keyes is a sly insurance man, a lifer with a nose for deception. His first moments onscreen are proudly spent deconstructing the lies of a man who sabotaged his own vehicle for the insurance money; when the scene is finished, Keyes has given the man a parachute, and the man is sent — quite gratefully — on his way. Keyes and Neff have been friends for over a decade, and eventually Keyes offers Neff a grand position, though one that pays less than he currently makes.
Keyes is the most defined of all the characters, a twenty-six-year insurance veteran with just the right amount of ambition and objectivity. He takes pride in his protege’s success, and when Neff comes under scrutiny, Keyes doesn’t hesitate to vouch for his friend and partner. Truly fascinating, however, is Keyes’ speculation of the details of the Dietrichson claim. It isn’t suicide, it isn’t an accident, he tells Neff one afternoon. It was murder, he says, and then he explains just how the murder could be executed. He is precisely correct about every single detail, and poor Neff’s sweat seems to bead on the TV screen as Keyes paints his picture. If the movie feels familiar, if the plot feels like a road you’ve trudged down before, it’s not the film’s fault. In the sixty-four years since its release, duplicitous life insurance scams and murders have become trite and over-employed twists in everything from Lifetime movies and daytime soaps to award-winning feature films and Saturday morning cartoons. This is, however, one of the first, and it holds its own even now. And it did well in its day, capturing seven Academy Award nominations, though it failed to secure any of them.
Wilder’s film ends somberly, with a healthy dose of come-uppance and tragic ends. If there are any happy notes to be found, they are in the offscreen reunion of two secondary characters, both of whom have seen their innocent pleasures manipulated by others. Something to watch for: MacMurray’s wedding ring, which he repeatedly forgot to remove for filming, suggesting erroneously that his character, Neff, was not only conducting an affair with a married woman, but betraying some unseen wife of his own.
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