During the war a new mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness had crept into the American cinema. Double Indemnity was the best written, the most characteristically film noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic.
—Paul Schrader, film historian
In his book on film noir, William Hare repeats the story that one day Billy Wilder could not find his secretary. He was told by one of the women in the office that she was holed up in the ladies’ room, reading a novella titled Double Indemnity. After she emerged with the novelette “pressed against her bosom,” Wilder decided to read it himself.1 A nice anecdote, but apocryphal.
Wilder maintained that Joseph Sistrom, the enterprising young executive who had suggested that Wilder turn the play Connie Goes Home into The Major and the Minor, “had read the [Cain] story and brought it to my attention.”2 Sistrom was a devotee of popular fiction and was familiar with the pulp fiction turned out by Cain and others. He had read Double Indemnity as it was serialized in Liberty magazine, in back issues from February 15 through April 4, 1936, which he had found in the story department’s archives. When Double Indemnity was published in book form in 1943, he suggested the property to Wilder.
The story, a turgid tale of greed, lust, and betrayal, was right up Wilder’s street. After all, “the Berlin of the 1920s had taught Wilder to recognize decadence when he saw it,” as Richard Schickel writes in his monograph on this film.3 Double Indemnity portrayed a decadent, depraved world of violence and duplicity. Wilder would give us a foreigner’s vision of the underside of American life, as represented by the back streets of Los Angeles where the film is set. It is a drab world, devoid of beauty and decency.
Wilder was aware from the get-go that Cain’s story would present him with censorship problems. The novella had already been considered and rejected by the major studios in 1935, shortly before it was serialized in Liberty magazine. This lurid tale describes how a villainess named Phyllis lures Walter, an insurance salesman, into a conspiracy to murder her husband for his insurance money—a conspiracy that becomes a recipe for their destruction. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had inquired of Joseph Breen whether Cain’s novelette was suitable for filming. Breen shot back a letter to MGM executive Louis B. Mayer, dated October 10, 1935, in which he asserted, “The story deals improperly with an illicit and adulterous sex relationship. The general low tone and sordid flavor of this story make it . . . thoroughly unacceptable for screen production,” according to the censorship code implemented by the industry in 1934.4 Moreover, Breen noted, the novella portrayed the actual planning and carrying out of a murder plot in minute detail, and “filmmakers were forbidden to depict details of a crime that might permit its imitation in real life.” Indeed, Breen considered the novella to be a “blueprint for murder,” which could show potential criminals how to kill for profit.5 Breen’s letter scared off not only MGM but also every other studio in town from considering Double Indemnity as a viable film project.
Cain remembered his agent’s showing him a copy of Breen’s report: “It started off, ‘UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES,’ and ended up, ‘NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM.’ My agent asked me if I wanted to hear what was in between, and I told him I could guess.” Eight years later, when Double Indemnity was published in book form, “my new agent, H. N. Swanson, sent it again to eight studios,” Cain recalled. Sistrom passed it on to Wilder, who snapped it up and immediately “took it home and read it.” Wilder arranged to buy the screen rights for a mere fifteen thousand dollars—there were no other bids.6
On September 21, 1943, Paramount sent Breen a screen treatment of Double Indemnity, a detailed synopsis that Wilder had prepared in conjunction with Charles Brackett. The censor felt that the revised story line, which they had composed according to his specifications, had overcome in large measure his original concerns. Breen added that, after all, “adultery is no longer quite as objectionable” as it once was in motion pictures.7
Sistrom agreed to produce Double Indemnity in Brackett’s stead, although the self-effacing young exec declined to accept a screen credit for doing so. He was listed officially as associate producer. But Wilder still needed someone to replace Brackett as his cowriter on the screenplay. Wilder had hoped to engage Cain himself to help him adapt his novella for film, but Cain was then under contract to Twentieth Century–Fox and could not accept a writing assignment at another studio. Sistrom suggested another eminent crime novelist, Raymond Chandler, to collaborate with Wilder on the screenplay. Wilder had read Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep and knew of his regular contributions to pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask, which specialized in crime stories. He was impressed with Chandler’s lively narrative style and pungent dialogue. Although Chandler had no previous experience in screenwriting, Wilder accepted Sistrom’s suggestion to engage Chandler, especially because Chandler “could put a nasty spin on dialogue.”8
Chandler was interested in working with a writer-director who had already made an important wartime thriller, Five Graves to Cairo. His one hesitation was that he personally did not much care for Cain’s crime novels. In a letter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of his publisher, Alfred Knopf, on October 22, 1942, Chandler said of Cain, “Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is a faux naif, a Proust in overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk,” scrawling obscenities on a board fence when no one is looking. In short, Chandler disapproved of novelists like Cain “not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.”9 Withal, Chandler welcomed the opportunity to increase his income, since the sales of his short stories to pulp magazines proved woefully insufficient to pay his living expenses.
Double Indemnity deals with the great American pastime of cheating an insurance company, and it does so with deadly seriousness. According to Wilder, Cain based his novella on the notorious Snyder-Gray case, which fascinated Wilder as well. John McCarty agrees that Cain’s novelette offers striking parallels to “the real-life murder case of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who conspired to kill Snyder’s husband for $100,000 in insurance money” in Queens Village, New York, in 1927. “Unlike Cain’s fictional couple, however, Snyder and Gray were caught and sent to the electric chair.”10 Snyder achieved tabloid immortality when she became the first woman in New York to be executed. Moreover, a photojournalist smuggled a camera into the execution chamber at Sing Sing on January 12, 1928, and snapped a picture of Snyder just as the juice was turned on. The next day, the photograph appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News. Certainly the photo would have drawn Cain’s attention to the trial, if he had not been following it already.
When Wilder scheduled a preliminary meeting with Chandler in his office on the fourth floor of the writers’ building at Paramount on May 12, 1943, he expected the author of hard-boiled detective fiction to be a burly, tough-looking type. Instead, Wilder recalled, he beheld a fifty-five-year-old gentleman wearing a frayed tweed jacket that made him look like a somewhat eccentric British schoolteacher. Chandler also had a sickly complexion, which to Wilder betokened that Chandler was “a man who has drowned himself in drink.”11
It is true that Chandler had officially sworn off liquor by the time he went to work at Paramount, Al Clark comments, but the writer was a closet alcoholic who kept a pint bottle of bourbon stashed in his briefcase. Wilder was sure that Chandler would take a nip from the bottle whenever Wilder went to the restroom while they were working together. “Chandler responded all too easily to the climate of genial dipsomania” that prevailed among many of the writers, and he regularly drank with them at the end of the day at Lucy’s, a bistro frequented by Paramount employees.12 Wilder put up with Chandler’s drinking habits, he said later, because “he was one of the greatest creative minds I have ever worked with, though more trouble than any other writer I’ve ever worked with.”13
At all events, during their first story conference, Chandler informed Wilder, “This is already Tuesday; I cannot promise you the script until next Monday.” Chandler was obviously laboring under the misconception that he was expected to write the screenplay on his own and in record time. Wilder responded that the studio was prepared to offer Chandler $750 a week for writing the script in collaboration with Wilder himself. To the mystery writer, accustomed to paltry payments from pulp publishers, this seemed a handsome sum. Still, Wilder warned Chandler, “You don’t know how scripts are written.”14 Wilder gave Chandler a copy of Cain’s novella, plus a copy of his own script for Hold Back the Dawn as a model screenplay, and told him to get to work.
Not heeding Wilder’s warning, the neophyte screenwriter showed up at his next meeting with the director toting sixty-five pages of script, whereas Wilder had turned out three pages of the opening scene. For the most part, Schickel records, “Chandler had typed up Cain’s dialogue in the best imitation he could manage of screenplay form.” Wilder, with typical Wilder exaggeration, claimed Chandler had added camera directions like “the camera slips in through the keyhole and sniffs her undies.”15 Wilder took one look at Chandler’s batch of script pages, tossed them back at him, and barked, “This is crap, Mr. Chandler.” “You don’t know a damn thing about writing for the screen,” Wilder reiterated. “But I’ll teach you.”16
Wilder went on to explain that Cain had written the novella in a hurried, slapdash fashion because he needed money, as Cain was the first to admit.17 As a result, the story’s narrative structure and character development needed shoring up. Wilder concluded by advising Chandler to forget about inserting camera directions into the script, since that was the director’s business. “Just let’s write characters and situations.”18 A morose, touchy man, Chandler preferred to work alone, so he resented the script conferences Wilder imposed on him, terming them “godawful jabber sessions.” Specifically, Chandler resented having to collaborate with this brash, opinionated filmmaker on a daily basis. He grew testier and more disagreeable as time went on.19
Admittedly, Wilder was an excitable man who had his share of eccentricities, and they bothered Chandler. After all, Chandler had never before been forced to write in the same room with another person. Wilder paced back and forth while they discussed the screenplay, often brandishing a malacca cane, which he sometimes rudely waved in Chandler’s face as he emphasized a point. Chandler saw this as the height of incivility.
Wilder had some grievances of his own. Chandler smoked a pipe from which emanated clouds of noxious smoke but insisted that the office windows remain tightly shut because he was convinced that the Los Angeles smog was hazardous to his health. One day, in exasperation, Wilder snapped, “Ray, would you raise the window just this once, for Chrissakes?”20
Finally, one morning four weeks into coauthoring the script, Chandler, who was an inveterate collector of injustices, real or imagined, declined to report for work. Instead, he issued a written ultimatum to Wilder. It was a letter of complaint, the director recalled, in which Chandler maintained that he was fed up with Wilder’s rudeness. The letter insisted that Wilder “is at no time to swish under Mr. Chandler’s nose or to point in his direction the thin, leather-handled Malacca cane which Mr. Wilder is in the habit of waving around while they work. Mr. Wilder is not to give Mr. Chandler orders of an arbitrary nature, such as ‘Ray, will you open that window?’ ”21
Sistrom acted as mediator; he contacted Chandler, who told him succinctly, “I don’t want to work with that son-of-a-bitch any more.”22 Nevertheless, Sistrom coaxed him into reporting for work the following morning. Wilder and Chandler made a truce, although Wilder reminded him, “For God’s sake, Ray, we don’t have court manners around here.” But he apologized just the same, simply because he still admired Chandler’s writing ability and very much wanted him to continue collaborating on the script. For a tyro screenwriter to exact an apology from an influential film director was deemed something of an achievement at the writers’ table in the Paramount commissary. The rancor that characterized Wilder and Chandler’s relationship, however, did not interfere with their collaboration on the script.
The completed script is dated September 25, 1943; filming began the following week. Chandler was kept on salary throughout the shooting period to help Wilder revise any scene that needed work. In all, Chandler was on salary for six months, from May through November 1943, netting him eighteen thousand dollars—more money than he had made in a long time.
During the shooting period, Chandler agreed to do a silent cameo for the film. Sixteen minutes into the film, Walter Neff leaves the office of Barton Keyes and passes a lone figure sitting in the corridor, reading a magazine and facing the camera. Neff does not notice him, but he notices Neff: Raymond Chandler looks up from his magazine and gazes at Neff for a moment, and then returns to his reading.
Chandler and Wilder had initially planned to borrow as much of Cain’s tough, spare dialogue from the novelette as possible. As time went on, however, Chandler realized that the novella’s dialogue needed reworking for the screen. Wilder disagreed, Cain remembered, “and he was annoyed that Chandler wasn’t putting more of it in the script.” To settle the matter, Wilder enlisted a couple of contract players to read passages of Cain’s original dialogue from the book. “To Wilder’s astonishment, he found out it wouldn’t play,” said Cain. After the actors read a scene straight from the book, Chandler pointed out to Wilder that the dialogue sounded like “a bad high school play. The dialogue oversaid everything and, when spoken, sounded quite colorless and tame.”23
As Chandler later told Cain in a consultation, “Jim, that dialogue of yours is for the eye,” not for the ear. “I tried to explain it to Billy.” Chandler continued, telling Cain that his clipped dialogue had no sting and even sounded flat when it was spoken aloud. Chandler added that the book’s dialogue, particularly the exchanges between Phyllis and Walter, had to be “sharpened and pointed” for the screen. Cain graciously replied that he fully understood why Chandler and Wilder had not used more of his “deathless dialogue” in the picture.24 The upshot is that the film’s taut, cynical dialogue owes more to Chandler and Wilder than it does to Cain. “We improved it quite a bit,” Wilder said later. He was impressed with the way Chandler could “get the flavor of California” into his flip and mordant writing, in both his scripts and his novels.25 Chandler, after all, was a native of Chicago who had been educated in England.
The title of the film refers to the double insurance benefit paid out in the event of accidental death. Phyllis Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff, an insurance agent, into helping her murder her husband and making it look like an accident so they can cash in his insurance policy. Phyllis is confident that Walter can aid her in defrauding the insurance company, since he is employed by the firm that has insured her husband.
Walter’s willingness to buy into Phyllis’s sordid moneymaking scheme brings clearly to prominence a theme that often surfaces in Wilder’s films. As Wilder himself formulated that theme, “People will do anything for money, except some people, who will do almost anything for money.” This is Wilder’s satirical comment on the erosion of values in our modern acquisitive society. Without a doubt, Walter is just as willing as Phyllis to do anything for money, not excluding homicide. In fact their love story is fundamentally grounded in their mutual desire to collect the death money.
Although Chandler and Wilder had to revise Cain’s dialogue, at times they were able to employ a passage from the novella just as Cain wrote it. For example, in the book Walter admits that he had considered bilking the insurance company that employed him long before he met Phyllis; Chandler and Wilder reproduced this passage virtually intact in the film. Walter begins by explaining how he has become an expert in heading off policyholders who try to defraud the company. He continues, “You’re like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don’t crook the house. And then one night you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself and do it smart, because you’ve got the wheel right smack under your hands. You know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out front, a shill to put down the bet. Suddenly the doorbell rings, and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you.”26
Andrew Sarris complained that Wilder offered no satisfactory explanation for Neff’s transformation into a killer: “I have never been able to perceive the motivational moment in which Walter Neff, the breezy insurance salesman and devil-may-care womanizer, is transformed into a purposeful murderer.”27 John Gregory Dunne responded, “The answer has always seemed obvious to me: Phyllis Dietrichson gave Walter Neff an erection, and from that moment on Neff’s underdeveloped common sense took up residence in his scrotum.”28 In sum, Alan Woolfolk says, “The manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson provides the opportunity and perhaps some additional incentive, to which Walter is entirely susceptible.”29
The dark, brooding atmosphere of the film, coupled with the equally somber vision of life reflected in this tale of obsession and murder, marks Double Indemnity as belonging to that class of American melodramas that French film critics christened around that time film noir (dark film). This trend in American cinema was just surfacing when Wilder made Double Indemnity during World War II. The pessimistic view of life exhibited in such movies was an outgrowth of the disillusionment that would continue into the cold war. Others see film noir as a specific style of filmmaking that can be applied to various genres. To be precise, a noir film can be identified by its grim, sinister tone and its bleak, cynical thematic vision. Film noir depicts a stark night world peopled by characters who are trapped in a decadent, crime-ridden society.30
Foster Hirsch opines that “the best noir directors were German or Austrian expatriates who shared a world view that was shaped by their bitter personal experiences of . . . escaping from a nation that had lost its mind.” Thus some of Wilder’s films, like Double Indemnity, can be deemed examples of film noir. “The group of expatriate directors who were to become the masters of the noir style,” Hirsch continues, brought to their American films a predilection for “stories about man’s uncertain fate, and about psychological obsession and derangement.”31 Double Indemnity is very much in keeping with the conventions of film noir, with its spare, unvarnished realism, typified by the stark, newsreel-like quality of the cinematography, especially in the scenes that occur in sleazy places at night.
Ed Muller noted that “Double Indemnity was a trend-setting film, which helped to establish film noir.”32 That Double Indemnity was in the vanguard of film noir movies is evident from a seminal essay on film noir by French film critic Nino Frank, published in the August 28, 1946, issue of L’écran française (The French screen). In it Frank terms Double Indemnity an example of “a new type of crime film” coming out of Hollywood, which he designates as film noir. Frank thus coined the term and was the first critic to use it in print. He also singled out John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as a hard-boiled private eye, as significant in the development of film noir.33
Both The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity feature a crafty, malevolent femme fatale, who uses men and then discards them. Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity are both prototypical femmes fatales; each is a heartless, double-dealing female. The femme fatale would become “one of the mainstays of classic noir,” writes Jason Holt—“fatal not only to the sap who falls for her, but also to herself.”34 That, in a nutshell, describes Phyllis Dietrichson.
Nevertheless, Wilder said, “Although Double Indemnity has quite a reputation today as an example of film noir, I was not aware of being part of a trend at the time.” Indeed, Wilder never thought of any of his movies as belonging to the category of film noir when he made them. “I didn’t set out to make a particular style of film,” he declared. “You’re trying to make as good and as entertaining a picture as you possibly can. If you have any kind of style, the discerning ones will detect it.”35
Y. Frank Freeman, vice president of Paramount, shared Charles Brackett’s opinion that Double Indemnity was a sordid movie. Freeman, who came to Paramount with experience in the soft drink industry, belonged to the religious Right. He hated the idea of Paramount’s making the film, but he was outvoted by other executives, including the head of production, B. G. “Buddy” De Sylva. Wilder disliked Freeman, and he was not alone. Indeed, the standing joke around the lot about the high-handed, narrow-minded mogul was for someone to ask, “Why Frank Freeman?”36
At any rate, Freeman did not encourage any of his top actors to appear in Double Indemnity. So Wilder had trouble casting the leads—except for the role of the insurance claims investigator, Barton Keyes. Edward G. Robinson accepted the part because “at my age it was time to begin thinking of character roles, to slide into middle age. . . . I was never the handsome leading man; I could proceed with my career growing older in roles that would grow older, too.”37
Wilder told me that every leading man in town turned down the role of the randy, womanizing murderer Walter Neff. “I confess that I even sank so low as to offer the role to George Raft,” the second-string star of mediocre melodramas like Background to Danger (1943). “And that’s pretty low!” Raft had an assistant read the screenplay for him, Wilder continued, “because he couldn’t read.” When Raft advised Wilder that he would take the part only on the condition that Neff turn out to be an FBI agent and arrest Phyllis at the end of the picture, Wilder replied that that was out of the question. “So George Raft turned down the role; and that’s when we knew we had a good picture.”38 (Raft was not noted to be a shrewd judge of roles; he also passed up the lead in The Maltese Falcon.)
Wilder finally turned to Fred MacMurray, who hesitated to accept the part because he normally played “happy-go-lucky good guys” in light comedies. “You’re making the mistake of your life!” he exclaimed to Wilder. Playing a serious role required acting, he explained, “And I can’t do it.”39 Wilder responded that he was confident that MacMurray could play Neff and that he could guide him through the part. MacMurray had one other reservation about taking the part: he feared that Wilder’s wish to cast him against type as a cad and a scoundrel would ruin his screen image.40 But Wilder wanted MacMurray to play Walter precisely because Walter’s charming manner and affable grin belie the lust and larceny inside him, and MacMurray’s surface charm would make his performance all the more chilling as a result.
Similarly, Barbara Stanwyck hesitated to accept the role of Phyllis Dietrichson, a woman so thoroughly malicious and unscrupulous. Stanwyck had been paired with MacMurray in the 1940 romantic comedy Remember the Night, which was written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, and she likewise wanted to maintain a positive image with her fans. But Stanwyck too relented because she trusted Wilder: “I knew him a little from Ball of Fire,” she explained. “You couldn’t help but notice how he cared about his script.”41
Stanwyck’s portrayal of Phyllis won her a place in film history as a legendary femme fatale. Wilder gave Stanwyck a tacky blonde wig because he wanted it to project “the phoniness of the girl—bad taste, phony wig,” with cheap perfume to match.42 Wilder said that, after he made Double Indemnity, “MGM made another James M. Cain novel into a picture, The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946], with Lana Turner as the wife of the proprietor of a hot dog stand. She was made up to look glamorous instead of slightly tarnished the way we made up Barbara Stanwyck for Double Indemnity, and I think Postman was less authentic as a result.”
The studio allocated a budget for Double Indemnity of $980,000, which Wilder adhered closely to. The budget allowed him a salary of $44,000 for the four months he spent writing the screenplay with Chandler and $26,000 for the two months he spent directing it. But his total take was still less than the $100,000 apiece that MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Robinson were paid for starring in the picture.
Principal photography began on September 27, 1943. Wilder wanted to present an uncompromising picture of a corrupt, essentially lawless urban environment by shooting on location in the crooked streets and back alleys of Los Angeles. Schickel remarks, “Wilder’s judicious use of locations around Los Angeles is noteworthy; it is enough to take the film out of the studio context. Los Angeles was a city which was somewhat amoral; Wilder noticed that when he first came to town.”43 In the film, the gray atmosphere reflects the bleak lives of the characters, who live in run-down neighborhoods that have seen better days. Walter occupies a chintzy bachelor flat, and Phyllis lives with a husband who is nearly twice her age in a crumbling stucco bungalow. (The house used for exteriors is located at 6301 Quebec Street in the Hollywood Hills.) Wilder said, “I strove for a strong sense of realism in the settings in order to match the kind of story we were telling. I wanted to get away from what we described in those days as the white satin decor associated with MGM’s chief set designer, Cedric Gibbons [Ninotchka].”
Hans Dreier, head of Paramount’s art department, had, like Wilder, started his career at Ufa in Berlin in the 1920s. He assigned Hal Pereira as production designer on Double Indemnity. Wilder instructed Pereira to design the interiors of the Dietrichson house to appear drab. Thanks to Pereira’s astutely placed venetian blinds, the faces of Walter and Phyllis, when they converse in the house, are at times barred with shadows that imply imprisonment of body or soul. Once the set was ready for shooting, Wilder said, “I would go around and overturn a few ashtrays in order to give the house in which Phyllis lived an appropriately grubby look, because Phyllis is a poor housekeeper—an index of her indifference to her husband.” Wilder got on well with Pereira, and they would work together again. Dreier, who supervised Pereira’s work, was likewise pleased with the results. Wilder continued, “I also worked with the cameraman, John Seitz, to put dust in the air, to give the house a sort of musty look. We blew aluminum particles into the air, and when they floated down into a shaft of sunlight, they looked just like dust.” (Real dust is invisible to the camera’s eye.) “It was just right for that creepy house in the Valley,” Wilder concluded. “I like that kind of realism.”
Principal photography wrapped on November 24, 1943, just short of two months. When it came to postproduction, Miklos Rozsa contributed a portentous, dissonant score that establishes from the start an overall sense of dread and foreboding. It was not typical of the usual melodic Hollywood score, and Wilder soon discovered that Louis Lipstone disliked its discordant, morose themes even more than he had disapproved of Rozsa’s similar background music for Five Graves to Cairo. When Lipstone informed Wilder of his negative judgment of the Double Indemnity score, Wilder stared him down and barked, “You may be surprised to hear that I love it. Okay?”44 So Wilder overruled Lipstone again, and he was ultimately vindicated. Rozsa’s brooding score for Double Indemnity influenced the background music for subsequent noir films “like no other soundtrack of the 1940s,” writes Robert Horton. “The opening credits alone—a doom-laden thump of a funeral march,” all pounding chords and throbbing drum beats—“establishes the noir vibe with brazen audacity.”45
The opening credits of the film show the silhouette of a man hobbling toward the camera on crutches; his shadow grows larger until it fills the screen. This menacing image prefigures Walter’s temporary impersonation of Phyllis’s crippled husband after Walter murders him.
The film proper opens with a stunning sequence: A speeding car careens down a dark street late at night; a stoplight in the foreground of the shot changes from go to stop, but the auto runs the light. “This is, of course, a visual symbol for everything we are about to learn about the car’s occupant, Walter Neff,” says Schickel. Walter will “run all the stoplights in his relationship with Phyllis Dietrichson.”46
Nursing a gunshot wound in his shoulder, Walter lurches into the building that houses the offices of the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company, where he is employed. He settles down at his desk, inserts a cylinder into the Dictaphone, and begins a memo to Barton Keyes, chief claims investigator for the insurance company. The memo takes the form of a confession, which Walter narrates, in voice-over on the sound track, while the story of his deadly alliance with Phyllis is portrayed in flashback. Wilder said that the secret of doing a voice-over in a movie was to “be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.”47 He followed this rule in the script for Double Indemnity; Walter’s caustic voice narration provides a running commentary on the events the viewers see unfolding on the screen.
Since Walter is dictating an office memorandum, he supplies some vital statistics, starting with the date, July 16, 1938. Dating Neff’s memo, explains Peter Evans, “represents a common way at the time of avoiding reference to the war.”48 Walter identifies himself as “Walter Neff, insurance agent, thirty-five years old, unmarried.” He glances down at the bullet wound in his shoulder and adds, “No visible scars, until a little while ago, that is.” Then, with a line lifted from a later scene in the book, Walter observes stoically that he killed Dietrichson: “I killed him for money and a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”49 Remarks such as this lend the film a fatalistic atmosphere, for the viewer knows that Walter is doomed from the start.
With that, Walter begins to tell his tale. Wilder reminds the viewer that Walter is relating his own story by periodically returning to him sitting before the Dictaphone; each time Wilder does so, the bloodstain on Walter’s suit coat is larger. As Walter starts to narrate his story, he begins with lines once more taken directly from the novella. He says, “It all began last May. I remembered this policy renewal on Los Feliz Boulevard, so I drove over there,” to the home of the Dietrichsons.50
When Walter sees Phyllis for the first time, she is standing on the staircase landing, looking down at him. She is draped in the white bath towel she has donned for sunbathing. Phyllis’s apparel suggests purity in color only, for, as the story unfolds, she will display her true colors. As she descends the stairs, Walter notices her gold ankle bracelet, which is shown in close-up. Evans writes, “The anklet dangles invitingly in front of him as she crosses her legs in the living room.” It is “an anklet which Walter relishes all the more for cutting into her flesh,” as Walter admits in his voice-over.51 Walter’s obsession with the anklet implies that it is for him a sexual fetish by which he is chained to Phyllis.
Walter also notices the scent of Phyllis’s cheap perfume, which reminds him of the honeysuckle he smelled on the way to the Dietrichson house. He comments, in voice-over on the sound track, “It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” The cloying aroma that pervades the area is an emblem of “the rotten, sickly-sweet corruption” of Phyllis Dietrichson’s domain.52
Chandler and Wilder concocted some salty, innuendo-strewn interchanges for Walter and Phyllis not found in Cain’s novelette. A striking example occurs during their first encounter. Walter gets fresh with Phyllis after eyeing her provocatively draped towel: “I’m an insurance agent, and I can see you are not fully covered.” Phyllis responds in a playful, coy fashion that demonstrates that she is Walter’s match when it comes to naughty innuendo: “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff.” Walter replies, “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.” “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” Phyllis answers with a smirk.
As Walter prepares to leave, he inquires suggestively whether Phyllis will be home when he returns to see her husband. “I wonder what you mean,” Phyllis says. Walter retorts, “I wonder if you wonder.” As a matter of fact, when Walter returns, Phyllis is home, but she has made sure that her husband is not. Phyllis then broaches to Walter the possibility of his drawing up a double indemnity accident policy for her husband. In due course, this leads to their planning Dietrichson’s death for the insurance money.
Walter’s better judgment tells him not to get involved with a femme fatale like Phyllis, writes Frank Krutnik, and Walter’s “voice-over commentary provides a suggestively phallic metaphor for the danger and excitement” of the enterprise.53 “I knew I had hold of a red-hot poker,” Walter muses, “and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off.” Walter ignores his misgivings, however, and goes along with Phyllis’s plot. In short, although Walter is capable of recognizing evil when he sees it, he still succumbs to it.
A central metaphor in the Chandler-Wilder script is that of a trolley car one must ride to the end of the line.54 When Walter agrees to help Phyllis liquidate her husband, he says that their plan “has got to be perfect, straight down the line.” Walter immediately comments in a voice-over, “The machinery had started to move, and nothing could stop it.” As Walter prepares to kill Dietrichson later that same night, he reflects on the sound track that fate “had thrown the switch. The gears had meshed.” The trolley “had started to move, and nothing could stop it.”
After the murder, Keyes parallels Walter’s “straight down the line” perception. Keyes suspects Phyllis of engineering her husband’s death with the help of an unknown accomplice. “They’ve committed a murder,” he says, “and that’s not like taking a trolley ride together, where each one can get off at a different stop. They’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line. And it’s a one-way trip, and the last stop is the cemetery.”
The scene in which Walter murders Phyllis’s husband provides a dramatic high point in Walter’s narrative. Dietrichson is determined to take a train trip, despite the fact that he has a broken leg and must walk with crutches. As Phyllis drives him to the train station, Walter crouches unseen in the backseat of the car. When Walter suddenly pounces on Dietrichson and chokes him to death, the camera moves in on a close-up of Phyllis, who stares unflinchingly at the road ahead. Wilder allowed the audience to imagine the murder while it takes place off camera, “because what the audience does not see can sometimes be more frightening than what they do see.”
Because Dietrichson is slain when he has a broken leg, Walter must board the train on crutches when impersonating him, recalling the image of the dark figure on crutches in the opening credits. Walter must make it appear that the crippled man was killed as the result of an accidental fall from the train. He accordingly rides the train for a few miles and then jumps off, crutches and all, at the prearranged spot, where Phyllis is waiting for him with her husband’s corpse still in the car. Walter dumps the body, along with the crutches, on the railroad track.
The low-key lighting that John Seitz employed in Five Graves to Cairo creates an even darker, more sinister atmosphere in Double Indemnity. In the scene in which the lovers implement their plan to murder Dietrichson, they are enveloped in almost total darkness. The lighting emphasizes how the guilty lovers are trying to hide their evil deed under a cloak of darkness. In retrospect, it is evident that in this film Seitz set the standard for the shadowy, somber lighting for the noir films to come.
It certainly looks as if Walter and Phyllis’s plan has worked and fate is on their side. But Keyes proves to be an obstacle to the success of their plot. Walter and Phyllis fear that he may eventually finger Walter as Phyllis’s partner in crime if he happens to see them together.
In one scene Phyllis is about to knock on the door of Walter’s apartment when she hears Walter talking with Keyes inside. As the door opens and Keyes comes out, Phyllis quickly hides behind the half-open door. Fred MacMurray told me that Wilder “tampered with realism” in that scene by having the door open outward into the hall, so that Phyllis can conveniently disappear behind it as Keyes leaves—despite the fact that doors normally open inward.55 Be that as it may, the scene provides another suspenseful highlight in the film, as Cain himself noted: “I wish I had thought of something like that.”56
Later on, Walter’s relationship with Phyllis unravels when he discovers that she has been using him to help her obtain the payoff from the insurance company. She actually plans to double-cross Walter by taking the money and running off—not with him but with still another, younger man. Walter forces a showdown with Phyllis in her stifling, shuttered living room. “Tangerine” is being crooned somewhere in the night, “probably from a neighboring radio” (as the script has it), and the romantic ballad wafts into Phyllis’s living room.57 The love song is an ironic comment on the romantic illusions Walter nurtured about the faithless Phyllis.
Walter tells Phyllis about Keyes’s theory that two people who commit murder are trapped on a trolley car and their only way out is death. He then informs Phyllis that he is not going to ride the streetcar to the end of the line; rather, he plans to get off the trolley “right at this corner.” With that, the pair shoot it out. Phyllis grievously wounds Walter and is about to fire again when she experiences a split second of remorse. She admits that she is “rotten to the heart.” Then she looks into his eyes and begs Walter to embrace her. She hesitates to fire the second shot, which will finish him off, and instead professes her need for him. As Bernard Dick describes Phyllis, “We see what Neff sees—a face that, for an instant, loses its rodent-like sharpness and becomes almost human. But it is only for an instant.”58 Walter, convinced of her deep duplicity, has trusted her for the last time. “I’m sorry, Baby; I’m not buying,” he mutters. “Goodbye, Baby.” Walter embraces her; then he fires two shots and kills her on the spot. Thus Walter’s final embrace of Phyllis ends when he ejaculates bullets into her; it is the logical consummation of their sordid liaison. Walter, though gravely wounded, still has enough life in him to make it to his office and record his confession for Keyes.
After viewing Double Indemnity, Cain remarked that it was “the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wished I had thought of; Wilder’s ending was much better than my ending.”59 It is easy to agree with Cain on that point. The novelette ends with Walter and Phyllis fleeing to Mexico onboard a steamer. But they have reason to believe that they have been recognized aboard ship, and so Phyllis, who has by now sunk completely into madness, convinces Walter to join her in a suicide pact by jumping overboard. Phyllis, a grotesque figure dressed in a blood-red shroud, with her face painted a deathly white, materializes like a ghostly apparition in Walter’s cabin to summon him to his doom. They both are prepared to die. The mass audience, Dick quite rightly judges, “would not understand anything quite so operatic.”60
Keyes, in describing his job as a claims investigator for Walter earlier in the movie, defines his role as “a doctor, a bloodhound, a cop, a judge, a jury, and a father-confessor, all in one.” Certainly Keyes is Walter’s father-confessor, since it is to Keyes that Walter confesses his crimes on the Dictaphone. In fact, the father-son relationship between Walter and Keyes is evident throughout the film. “The real love story is not between Neff and Phyllis, but between Neff and Keyes,” Jeffrey Meyers declares. “Neff’s criminal betrayal of his friend and mentor gives the tawdry story a new dimension.”61 Cain noted that “there’s a hint” of the filial relationship of Walter to Keyes in the book, “but it was extended in the movie.”62 As Schickel puts it, “Keyes’s part was expanded in the film to flesh out his relationship with Neff, which almost doesn’t exist in the book.”63
In the film, as Walter finishes dictating his memo to Keyes, he looks up and sees Keyes, who has been summoned by the night porter; he has been standing in the doorway, unobserved, for some time. Walter tells Keyes that he could not identify Dietrichson’s murderer “because the guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.” Keyes replies, “Closer than that, Walter.” Neff responds wryly, “I love you too.” Despite his offhand, almost mocking tone of voice, the remark reflects the deep affection and respect he nurtures for Keyes.
Walter’s strength is ebbing away, but he still manages to put a cigarette in his mouth, and Keyes lights it for him. In doing so, Keyes performs for Walter the ritual gesture of friendship that Walter has often performed for him. Throughout the film Walter lights Keyes’s cigar for him as an implicit gesture of filial feeling for his father figure. Now Keyes, with a veiled display of affection, returns the favor, as they await the police.
Some critics have inferred a hint of homosexuality in the relationship of Walter and Keyes. Parker Tyler goes so far as to say that Keyes is “secretly hot” for Neff, as evidenced by the scene described above. But such a reading of a Wilder movie misconstrues the value the director placed on male companionship in a number of his films.
Double Indemnity was originally intended to conclude with Walter’s execution. Wilder even filmed him dying in the gas chamber at San Quentin. The scene took five days to shoot and, according to Lally, cost a whopping $150,000. Actually, the itemized budget for the picture included only $4,700 for the set.64 Perhaps Wilder had the Snyder-Gray execution in mind when he developed the execution scene with Chandler. He shot the scene with minute precision: there were the pellets of poison dropping and the fumes they caused; in addition, “I had the priest from San Quentin, and I had the warden and the doctor.”65
The execution scene was shot before the scene portraying the last meeting between Walter and Keyes was filmed. Once that final, intimate exchange between Walter and Keyes was in the can, Wilder began to wonder if the execution scene was not superfluous. Without the execution scene to follow it, the viewer easily infers that Walter will soon die of his fatal wound. Moreover, after Wilder viewed the completed execution sequence, almost eighteen minutes of footage, he felt uneasy about it. He found it unduly gruesome and too harsh for the mass audience to digest, so he decided to end the film with Walter lying grievously wounded in the company of his fatherly friend. Thus, when Walter begs Keyes to give him time to make it across the border to Mexico, Keyes replies, “You’ll never make the elevator.” Walter staggers toward the exit, only to collapse helplessly in the doorway, where he lies at death’s door. One assumes he will die in Keyes’s arms, perhaps even before the police arrive.
The final version of the screenplay omits not only the execution scene but also a line of dialogue spoken by Walter to Keyes just after Walter says, “I love you too”—which is the last line in the final script and in the film as released. At this point in the original draft, Walter makes a final request of Keyes: “At the end of the trolley line, just as I get off, you be there to say goodbye, will you, Keyes?”66 This line was meant to serve as a transition to the execution scene, for, as James Naremore remarks, the initial version of the script “went on to show Keyes at the penitentiary, honoring his friend’s wishes.”67 Walter’s reference to the trolley car hearkens back to Keyes’s earlier observation that Phyllis and her partner in crime were trapped on a trolley car that would carry them to their doom. With or without the execution scene, Keyes’s ominous prediction comes true.
William Hare assumes that the ending of the released version of the film constitutes “new material” that Wilder and Chandler devised as a substitute for the execution sequence.68 A comparison of the original version of the screenplay (dated September 25, 1943) with the final version (dated November 27, 1943) shows his assumption to be false, however. The final script is shorter than the original simply because it omits the death chamber sequence and ends the film with the final encounter of Walter and Keyes in the insurance office.69 In any case, the gas chamber sequence seems to be a postscript to the story. The ending of the movie as it stands is much more powerful and moving, and could not be bettered. Wilder excised the execution scene while working on the final edit of the film with Doane Harrison.
Wilder remembered that, after a sneak preview of the picture in a theater in Westwood in July 1944, Cain waited for him in the lobby and told him that he much admired the film. His story, he told Wilder, “has been put on the screen exactly as I wrote it, only more so.”70
Critics hailed the movie as a thriller deftly served up by master chefs, with a superior script and inspired direction. The movie grossed more than $2.5 million on its initial release and garnered Oscar nominations for best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography (John Seitz), musical score (Miklos Rozsa), and actress (Barbara Stanwyck). Leo McCarey’s Going My Way, a sentimental Paramount picture with Bing Crosby as a priest, also received multiple nominations. The studio campaigned mostly for McCarey’s heartwarming picture, reasoning that it had a better chance of snagging Oscars than Wilder’s nasty movie. Wilder felt betrayed by his own studio and was miffed when his picture won no Academy Awards at the ceremony on March 15, 1945. When McCarey was on his way up to the podium to accept the best director award for Going My Way, Wilder recalled, he stuck his foot out and deliberately tripped McCarey. Wilder chortled, “Mr. McCarey stumbled perceptibly.”
When a reporter asked him after the ceremony for his reaction to the losses, Wilder snapped, “What the hell does the Academy Award mean, for God’s sake? After all, Luise Rainer won it two times—Luise Rainer!”71 (Rainer had won a best actress award for The Great Ziegfeld [1936] and another for The Good Earth [1937], but within three years her career had inexplicably evaporated, and by 1945 she was all but forgotten.) Nonetheless, even with no Oscar for his direction of Double Indemnity, Wilder was widely considered Paramount’s resident genius, since Preston Sturges, the only other writer-director on the lot, had severed his connection with the studio in December 1943.
In recent years commentators on Double Indemnity have steadily come to recognize it as quintessential film noir. “Double Indemnity was a milestone in opening new avenues for the frank portrayal of sexuality and criminality on the screen,” writes Gaylyn Studlar. “Wilder confirmed that Hollywood filmmakers could take a sophisticated, artistically complex approach to crime, even while operating under the moral restrictions” of the industry’s censorship code.72
Even though, Wilder said, Charles Brackett “thought I cheated on him with Raymond Chandler,” they were reconciled: “Charles and I got together again for The Lost Weekend,” a psychological study of an alcoholic.73 In addition to collaborating with Wilder on the screenplay, Brackett again acted as producer, and Wilder continued to direct. The word around the film colony was that the dynamic duo was back in action.