Double Indemnity (1944)

Credits: Director: Billy Wilder Story credits: based on the novel Double Indemnity by James M Cain; screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler Producer: Buddy G. DeSylva Music: Miklos Rozsa Cinematography: John Seitz Editing: Doane Harrison Art Decoration: Hans Dreier; Hal Pereira Set Decoration: Bertram C. Granger Costume: Edith Head

Cast: Fred MacMurray: Walter Neff Barbara Stanwyck: Phyllis Dietrichson Edward G. Robinson: Barton Keyes Porter Hall: Mr. Jackson Jean Heather: Lola Dietrichson Tom Powers: Mr. Dietrichson Byron Barr: Nino Zachetti Richard Gaines: Edward S. Norton, Jr. Fortunio Bonanova: Sam Garlopis

Key Terms/Concepts/Figures to Study this Week

Film noir; genre theory; genre studies; realism; the social problem film; semi-documentary crime melodrama; Raymond Chandler; James M. Cain; Billy Wilder; hardboiled fiction

Noteworthy Facts about the Film

Both Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray were initially reluctant to be cast in Double Indemnity. During the 1930s, Stanwyck had specialized in “the girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-track” roles” (e.g. Stella Dallas and Baby Face) and was eager to change her image into something more glamorous and virtuous. At the same time, she instinctively knew that playing the role of Phyllis Dietrichson might be her best performance yet. She finally said yes when Wilder reportedly asked her, “Are you an actress or a mouse?” MacMurray had been a second-tier actor at Paramount, playing likeable and boyish characters. In an interview years after the picture’s release, he stated the following: “I didn’t want to admit that I was refusing the part because I was afraid of it, because I feared that a guy who had played nothing but comedy roles would find this part too heavy to handle.”

The original ending to Double Indemnity, in which Neff is seen going to his death in the gas chamber, is locked away in the Paramount vaults and has never been viewed by the public, including film scholars and film reviewers.

The film was nominated for seven Academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. It received none.

Although Paramount had bought the rights to Double Indemnity in 1936, the studio waited eight years to produce it because executives were afraid it wouldn’t pass the Breen office. Indeed, Joseph Breen himself said, after reading the novel, that “The general low tone and sordid flavor makes it, in our judgment, thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation.”

Critical Commentary

“Wilder’s genius was to see that this new style of filmmaking [film noir] would be aesthetically redeeming for Cain’s subject matter, giving it a richness, a resonance, even, if you will, a touch of class that the writer’s blunt exploration of brutal emotions by means of simple declarative sentences had not had on the printed page.” –Richard Schickel

"In the long history of literary adaptation, it is hard to think of a screenplay that more markedly improved on its source, simultaneously eradicating its flaws and granting it nuances unimagined by its original author.” –James Naremore, More than Night

Chandler on Adapting Double Indemnity

“Nothing could be more natural and easy and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn’t quite play. . . It has a remote effect that I was at a loss to understand. It came to me then that the effect of your written dialogue is partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. Those unevenly shaped hulks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen, this is all lost, and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. They tell me that this is the difference between photographic dialogue and written dialogue. For the screen everything has to be sharpened and pointed and wherever possible eluded.”—Raymond Chandler to James M. Cain (on Cain’s dialogue)

Discussion Questions

1. As we discussed in Tuesday’s lecture, film noir’s visual style consists of chiaroscuro and low-key lighting, oblique camera angles, deep-focus shots, and a pervasive use of claustrophobic framing devices (such as doorways, windows, stairways, etc.). Many critics also note an “anti-traditional mise-en-scene” where the conventional balance and harmony of classical Hollywood cinema  is disrupted in favor of bizarre, off-angle compositions.  Please discuss how Double Indemnity incorporates one or more of these characteristics.

2. Ruthless, manipulative, sexually aggressive, and murderous, Phyllis Dietrichson is film noir’s most famous femme fatale.  Single out one scene from the film—such as the one where Neff first sees Phyllis, or when she first visits his apartment, or the scene in the car where she drives as Neff kills her husband—and discuss how she is represented visually and otherwise in the film.

3. Film noir’s protagonists are often “ordinary” men who, though not criminal by nature, wind up committing crimes of enormous magnitude because “fate” led them to it. Discuss how this is both true and not true of Walter Neff.

4. Like many films noirs, Double Indemnity employs a very sophisticated use of flashback and voice-over that tells the male protagonist’s story about why and how he got involved in a crime. Why do you think Neff decides to tell his story? What purpose does it serve for him? What is important about the fact that he tells it to Keyes, and that he uses a Dictaphone to tell his story?

5. One of the most important changes made in the screenplay was the expansion of the character of Keyes. What does Keyes contribute to the story? Billy Wilder once described the relationship between Keyes and Neff as the “love-story in the picture.” What do you think he meant by this?

6. Most critics have argued that Wilder and Chandler did a brilliant job of conveying “the general rootlessness of living in 1940s Los Angeles.” What do you think these critics mean by this description? And what are examples of this “rootlessness” in the film?