Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Sunday, December 29) my husband Charles and I watched two films back-to-back on Turner Classic Movies: Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece Double Indemnity (1944) and Rex Ingram’s equally marvelous The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (copyright 1920, released 1921). Watching Double Indemnity a night after TCM had shown The Postman Always Rings Twice was a revelation. Both films were based on novels by James M. Cain and both dealt with young, beautiful women married to much older men who seize on the intervention of young men from outside to be accomplices in knocking off their inconvenient husbands. Only Double Indemnity scored over Postman in every conceivable respect: the direction was by Billy Wilder, a major talent already totally assured even though it was only his third film (after The Major and the Minor and Five Graves to Cairo). He also co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler, another major noir novelist – though, as Wilder told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, “I wanted to do the script with Cain himself, actually, but Cain was doing a Western at 20th Century-Fox, so Chandler seemed the best choice. It was, incidentally, the first time he had worked on a script, or been inside a studio.” I remember reading an article in the Los Angeles Times years ago from one of those annoying people who insist that, contrary to the auteur theory that holds the director is the true creative force behind a film, it’s really the writer who dominates. What got me angry about this article is that its author cited Raymond Chandler as a star writer on the basis of Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet (a classic film noir based on Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, though he had nothing to do with the screenplay by John Paxton), and I wrote a letter saying that one thing that irked me about the screenwriter-as-auteur people was they themselves ignore the original authors of the novels or plays that got turned into movies. I pointed out that Raymond Chandler hadn’t created the plot, characters or situations of Double Indemnity: James M. Cain had.

Anyway, Double Indemnity remains one of the greatest movies ever made, the perfect summing-up of Cain’s world on film the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is for Dashiell Hammett and Murder, My Sweet is for Chandler. The plot deals with insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray, who got the part after George Raft turned it down because he demanded a “lapel bit” – a revelation that his character was an undercover cop or FBI agent out to pin a murder rap on a femme fatale – way to go, George; you turned down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and this!), who stops at a nice house in Los Feliz to get Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) to renew his auto insurance policy with the Pacific All-Risk company, for which Walter works. Mr. Dietrichson isn’t there, but his wife Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) is, and it’s lust at first sight between the two. Ultimately they hatch a plan by which Phyllis will take out an accident insurance policy on her husband and she and Walter will kill him together. The title “double indemnity” comes from a clause written in certain insurance policies to pay double the face amount for accidents that hardly ever happen – like a victim falling off a train and dying in the process. (Billy Wilder’s biographer, Maurice Zolotow, asked him if the insurance policy his wife had on him contained a double indemnity clause. It did not.) The plan comes off, though Walter is concerned about Phyllis’s choice of a witness to testify that Walter pitched her husband on an accident policy – her stepdaughter Lola (nicely played by Jean Heather) – and the presence of a witness on the train, Mr. Jackson (Porter Hall), who was out on the observation car as Walter, posing as Mr. Dietrichson, is just about to jump off around the spot where he and Phyllis have planted her husband’s body, since they’d actually killed him in his car before he even got on the train. But because Walter doesn’t want them to be seen together, he has them meet in the early 1940’s version of a supermarket (and since the film was shot during World War II, when food was rationed, the L. A. Police Department stationed four officers in the store to make sure the actors didn’t take anything home with them!), and the growing mistrust and hostility between them only gets worse when Lola tells Walter that she’s convinced Phyllis, who was the nurse taking care of her mother (Dietrichson’s first wife), actually murdered her and then married the widower. Ultimately there’s a blazing shoot-out between Walter and Phyllis at the Los Feliz house that ends with her dead and him badly wounded, though he lives long enough to tell the story in a voice-over narration ostensibly dictated on Dictaphone cylinders.

Also in the dramatis personae is Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a Javert-like claims examiner who’s trying to recruit Walter as his assistant and ultimately his replacement when he retires. Keyes intuits virtually the entire plot, but he pins it on the wrong man: Nino Zachetti (Byron Barr), Lola’s hot-headed boyfriend who becomes the boy-toy of Phyllis after she and Walter have conveniently dispatched her husband. In Wilder’s original ending, Walter was supposed to survive the shoot-out, get convicted of murdering the Dietrichsons and be executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin – and Billy Wilder, an opponent of capital punishment, took great pains to make the execution sequence look as brutal and gruesome as the real thing. But either someone at Paramount or the Production Code Administration decided that the execution scene was too much for audiences who’d already been taken on a wild sexual joyride pushing the limits of the Code. Wilder complained to Zolotow that audiences never got to see the two best scenes he ever filmed: the execution in Double Indemnity and the sequence he wanted to use to open Sunset Boulevard, in which the various corpses at the L.A. County morgue would start to talk to each other about how they died. (Wilder had to remove this scene after preview audiences laughed at it and found it ridiculous.) Instead Wilder and Chandler, with whom his relations had been testy at best, got back together and wrote a new ending that finishes this tough, hard-boiled story on a true note of pathos. Keyes confronts Walter just as he finishes his narration and Walter insists he’s going to escape to Mexico. “You won’t even make it to the elevator,” Keyes sardonically says. Walter collapses in the building hallway and as he expires Keyes gives him a cigarette, a running gag between them all movie. Walter tells Keyes he didn’t guess who Dietrichson’s murderer was because he was just in the next office from him, and Keyes says, “Closer than that,” as Walter expires. (In Cain’s original novel, the equivalent characters – the insurance salesman was Walter Huff and the victim was named Nirdlinger – do escape on a steamship bound for Mexico, but out of guilt feelings about what they’ve done commit joint suicide by throwing themselves overboard.)

Though the rewrite introduced a continuity glitch – Walter’s wounds from the gun battle with Phyllis don’t look serious enough to be life-threatening, and in the original script they weren’t – it also is a marvelously sardonic and at the same time strangely moving way to end an already remarkable film. As far as the acting is concerned, there’s no contest between Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice: Barbara Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale, wearing a blonde wig in the style of Marlene Dietrich’s hairdo in the 1941 film Manpower and acting with her usual power and authority. (By comparison, Lana Turner in Postman looks like a barely animate sex doll.) Fred MacMurray, who’d never played a villainous role before (though he would do so three more times, in The Caine Mutiny, Pushover – a reworking of Double Indemnity in which he played, not a corrupted insurance salesman, but a corrupted cop – and for Wilder again in The Apartment, after which a woman came up to him when he was in Disneyland with his wife and kids, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself for almost driving that nice Shirley MacLaine to suicide!” After that he swore that he would only play lovable roles in comedies from then on), is absolutely first-rate. So is Edward G. Robinson as essentially the voice of reason in this dark tale. In his autobiography, Robinson told the story of how he almost didn’t get this part. He ran into Billy Wilder at a Hollywood party, and Wilder said he’d offered him a part in a film called Double Indemnity but hadn’t heard back from him. Robinson had never heard of Double Indemnity, let alone been aware that he was being offered a role in it. The next day he called his agent, who told him that he hadn’t bothered to send him the script because he’d only be billed third. Robinson demanded to see the script, it was messengered over to him that afternoon, and he read it overnight and loved it. The next morning he called his agent and said, “I don’t care if I’m billed tenth! The next time you get a script that good for me, I want to see it!” Double Indemnity remains a great movie, far, far superior to Postman as a filmization of James M. Cain’s sexually and morally sordid world and one of Wilder’s best movies, along with The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard and what’s probably his best film, the woefully underrated Ace in the Hole a.k.a. The Big Carnival.