Double Indemnity
1944
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: The immaculate Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson
It’s hard for me to write about Double Indemnity because I love Double Indemnity so damn much that I have essentially no capacity to speak about it lucidly or objectively. All I can do is wildly flail my long fangirl arms and screech about how it’s pretty much the best movie ever made. There. I’ve warned you.
Walter Neff (MacMurray, in a non-Disney Dad role) is an insurance salesman who seems to be having a bad night. He stumbles to his office where he dictates a message to his friend and boss Barton Keyes (Robinson). The story he tells is one of meeting Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) when he was renewing her husband’s policy. Phyllis seduced Walter and convinced him to help her kill her husband and, as you may have already guessed, things head downhill for everyone.
Plain and simple, this is the most perfect film noir ever made. There are so many classic noir-isms that Wilder either establishes or perfects in Double Indemnity: the femme fatale, the fundamentally-good-but-fatally-flawed hero, the shadowy lighting, the sexual power trips, the hard-boiled dialogue, the symbolism, and even the names. Noir has great names, and this movie has some of the best: Walter Neff? If that name doesn’t scream “pushover,” I don’t know what does. You don’t doubt Neff falling for Phyllis and succumbing to her every whim when he has a name like that.
