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He is an "insurance man with a commission on his mind" and she is a "suburban
blonde with murder in her heart." Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck plot to
get her husband to sign an insurance policy that "pays double for accidental
death." Edward G. Robinson is the claims investigator that "puts a premium on
not being swindled." They note that Stanwyck got an Academy Award nomination
for her role and say that this movie is "so malicious, so satisfying that it
has become one of Hollywood's all-time best suspense thrillers." The back box
copy was written by Gene Shalit for the 1987 home video release. Who's Gene
Shalit? 1944, 107 minutes, VHS
You don't have to go any further than the opening credits of this one to know
that it's one of the titans of film noir. See, this is one that has a pedigree
you'd be hard pressed to argue with. Double Indemnity is based on a novel
written by James M. Cain, whom is best remembered for writing The Postman Always Rings Twice (at least that's how he's best remembered by me and I don't feel like checking
out his biography, so that credit will have to do). The film was directed by
Billy Wilder, who is famous for movies like Some Like It Hot, Sabrina, and The Apartment (okay, I did have to look those up). The screenplay is by Wilder and some
dude named Raymond Chandler. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that he's
famous for a handful of classic detective novels like The Big Sleep. The only thing you may questioning when you start this one off is when you
see that it stars Fred MacMurray. If you only remember him from his days
inventing flubber and advising Chip what to do about his gender confusion,
you'll be pleasantly surprised that Fred makes a very convincing murderer,
schemer, and dude who was a little too smart for his own good. You won't be
surprised to see Barbara Stanwyck as the beautiful dame who destroys every man
she breathes on. That character is typical of these movies and Babs is more
than up to the challenge of appearing to be played by Fred, all the while she
was playing him in a much bigger way. Also along for the ride is Edward G.
Robinson (I'm going to try like hell not to call him E.G. Marshall) who plays a
claims investigator named Keyes, that works in the same insurance office
where Fred works as a salesman. Keyes spends a lot of time talking
about some "little man" inside of him that he always listens to. It's a little
creepy since Eddie is so little to begin with and you wonder if he isn't going
to go psycho some day (but only if his "little man" tells him so). The movie
tells the rough and tumble tale of what happens when you work at something so
long that you begin to believe you can beat the very system you know so well.
It also tells the fairly standard tale of what happens when you get hooked on
looking at some sweet dame's gams and start to imagine how much better they
would
look with $50,000 in insurance money from her no account husband's demise. I
think we all know how this is going to end up for Fred (hint: he will not be
appearing in Triple Indemnity).  The movie uses one of those framing devices where the main character
(MacMurray's Walter Neff) relates what happened to get him in the situation he
currently finds himself. In this particular case, Neff stumbles into his
insurance office in the middle of the night, obviously wounded and dictates
everything that occurred into one of those machines, called a dictation machine
or something. This technique is very good for this film, because it allows for
a lot of hard-boiled narration by Neff, which only adds to the gritty
atmosphere of the movie. Walter is a dude that sells a lot of insurance to
people (he's frequently the highest volume salesman in the office) and one
afternoon he makes a house call to someone who needs their car insurance
renewed. The guy (or "mark" in insurance parlance) is named Dietrichson and he
is some type of rich oil guy. As with most oil tycoons, he is usually away at
the oil fields, putting down wildcat strikes, drilling new wells, and generally
ruining the environment all the while his way sex-ay wife is back at home,
steaming up the joint with her pent-up desires and unmentionable fantasies
(like how she wants to kill her husband). In this particular case, the little
hussy goes by the name of Phyllis, a dame who is fond of ice tea and greeting
men in a bath towel. Walter Neff rolls into her house and immediately likes
what
he sees in the form of the towel-clad, ignored wife of a rich oil tycoon who
needs some more car insurance. In fact, Walter develops what I call an
unnatural fixation on this ankle bracelet that Phyllis is partial to wearing.
Shoot, if you go to the local honkytonk any Friday night, you can see a passel
full of skanky broads with ankle bracelets on. You can spot them real easy
because they look like Jody Foster's character in that movie about those guys
accused of raping a woman in a bar. I think it was called The Accused or something. Ankle bracelets mean "I'm going out to your F-150 pick up truck
with you for ten minutes" not "classy, sophisticated wife of oil barron."  Walter is immediately taken with Phyllis and engages in some pretty raunchy
repartee (well, raunchy for 1944) that involves some fantasy of his where she's
a cop who pulls him over for speeding and gives him a warning and raps him
across the knuckles and I think you know how it all ends up if you've ever read
the "Letters to Forum" in Penthouse (which I of course haven't, but if you want to mail me some free sample
issues, I'd probably take a look, just so that I'd know what I'm talking
about). Walter leaves before he has a chance to spill his ice tea, if you
know what I mean, and goes back to the insurance office, where he thinks about
that ankle bracelet and his speeding ticket an awful lot. He gets a time set up
with her where he can come back and meet with the husband to go over the
insurance paper work and that should be that, right? Not exactly, because when
he goes back over there, the old man is still gone and she's all about whining
and complaining about her husband and his bitchy stepdaughter Lola (she just
doesn't understand me or treat me like a real mother, even though all I want
from her and her father is their stinking money). She's also whining about how
he's not as rich as he seems and starts to wonder about a life insurance policy
on him (uh-oh). Walter has been around the block a few times in his life
though and immediately sees that she is looking to bump the old codger off. He
acts all put out about it and leaves in a huff (only after getting a good dose
of the ankle bracelet I'm sure). Of course after he leaves, he immediately
begins to formulate a plan that would be foolproof and allow them to kill the
guy and collect the money. Walter has been in the biz long enough that he
figures he can be the guy to beat the system. The big problem though is to get
the claim past Barton Keyes and that dang "little man" inside of him that
suspects every single claimant as being a hustler out to scam some money off of
him. This is established as he beats down (mentally - he's got a "little man"
inside of him after all) a dude that's trying to recover the money on this
truck he burned up. Can't put anything past Keyes, especially if you're an
uneducated truck driver that sets fire to your own rig.  Walter consults Phyllis (usually at the local grocery store) about his plan.
The plan is simple: take out an life insurance policy on the old coot, one
that has a double indemnity clause (it pays out double the policy if you die by
some bizarre accident like being strangled by the Absent Minded Professor - who
would have ever thought that could happen?), strangle him, and dump his body on
the train tracks, making it look like he slipped and fell (whoopsie!). Just to
make it even better, we've got Walter pretending to be the dead guy on the
train so that all the witnesses would say that he was there, even though Walter
had killed him earlier in the evening (sounds like a full night for Walter,
huh?). Everything goes off without a hitch and there is a good suspenseful
scene where Phyllis' car won't start after they dumped the body on the tracks.
I think this is one of those deals like when I try and play chess. I see a
really good move and make it, not bothering to realize that that really good
move is most likely going to get me checkmated about five moves hence. Of
course I'm probably best known for my strategy of sacrificing my queen for
little more than getting the opponent's pawn in position to maybe get taken by
my knight. In any event, things begin to unravel for Walter after he puts his
"can't miss" plan into action. First of all, the insurance company takes a
fairly dim view of paying out on the double indemnity clause something like two
weeks after the policy was just taken out, especially when the dude broke his
leg a little before his death and had never made a claim on the accident policy
then. Second, and perhaps more important to Walter, how did he ever figure
that he and Phyllis could ever be together after this little scam? Sure he'd
probably knew they'd have to lay low for awhile, but did he think that Keyes
and his "little man" wouldn't notice when Walter started bringing Phyllis
around to the office Christmas party? And guess what else? Phyllis' teen-age
step daughter that hates her, Lola, is still hanging around and is pretty irked
that both her parents are dead. Guess who was the nurse that was watching over
Lola's mommy when she was gravely ill and eventually croaked? Guess who Lola
saw trying on a black veil days before the death of dear old dad? Well, she's fond of sipping ice tea and wearing an
ankle bracelet... The wheels come off when Walter finds out that while he has been laying low,
Phyllis has been laying lowlifes. Particularly Nino Zachetti, who we were
introduced to early in the movie as the scummy boyfriend of Lola's. True to
wicked stepmother form, Phyllis was scheming to get Nino so torqued off that
he would kill Lola in a blind rage. She also was scheming to kill Walter, who
by
this time realized that he needed to get busy with his own scheme. All the
while this stuff is going on, Keyes is sniffing around and getting to the
bottom of things. Of course, he figures that Phyllis and Nino are the two that
pulled off this caper and Walter figures that's as good a resolution as any and
goes over to confront Phyllis about her philandering and double-dealing ways
(I'm shocked Phyllis, shocked!). As you may have guessed, no one in this movie
gets off easy. It's a pretty uncompromising look at what greed and lust can do
to people and there is absolutely nothing redeeming about Phyllis, while Walter
acknowledges that he's just as bad as she is, but he still has a soft spot for
Lola and sends Nino off to find her and reconcile. Phyllis shoots Walter, then
falls into his arms and claims that she realizes she loves him. Walter, having
been punked throughout the proceedings says nothing and shoots her as he holds
her. Then he limps back to the office and is found dictating everything by
Keyes. A great movie that reveals its twists and turns at the right time
for maximum effect. The best part is that these doublecrosses aren't so
outlandish that they're unbelievable. The viewer gets to slowly realize along
with Walter that he wasn't the smart guy he thought he was and that he was
being played by Phyllis the moment he walked in the door. She's a classic user
as so many of these women are portrayed in the film noir genre and she destroys
anyone and
everyone to get whatever she wants. Walter, my boy, you never had a chance. Walter is pretty scummy himself, which is a nice change from the good guy led
astray motif that many of these movies use. He's hitting on a married woman as
soon as he walks in her door and doesn't look back, pausing only briefly to
wonder how he can talk to Lola and help her even though he's helped Phyllis
ruin her life. He proves though that he's a step up on the evolutionary
ladder from Phyllis by helping Lola out in the end (though I'm not sure how
much of a help, getting Nino back into her life was) and by confessing
everything to his good buddy Keyes. I was reminded a little bit of the ending
toCriss Cross where Burt Lancaster holds onto the love of his life and gets shot even though
she has played him throughout the movie for the money. Looking at this movie
in comparison to Criss Cross, you can see what an unrelenting grim work Double Indemnity is. In Criss Cross, Lancaster was a tough guy motivated in all his actions by his affection for a
woman that he couldn't put out of his mind. Here, Fred MacMurray's character
is an operator from the word go and his motivations are strictly lust and
money. At the end of his movie, Lancaster finally gets what he wants which is
to
simply hold his woman and protect her. Double Indemnity tells us that not even
in death will you be stopped getting tricked by dames, but unlike Lancaster,
MacMurray is smart enough to finally realize that fact. He is unconvinced of
her sudden change of heart and puts a bullet into her as she hugs him,
pretending to love him (no one ever really changes their stripes in Walter's
world - there's no such thing as love in it, only greedy people that end up
dead.) Even the bright spot at the end of the film isn't really bright at all.
Lola getting back with Nino who has an awful temper, treats her like dirt, and
has an affair with her step mother? Not exactly a fairy tale ending by any
stretch of the imagination. Double Indemnity remains one of the toughest pieces in the film noir oeuvre, offering an
apocalyptic look at anyone that would dare trust another and telling us that
there is no such thing as love in people, only opportunistic liaisons that last
as long as one partner deems it necessary to get what they want.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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