Double Indemnity is the archetype of noir film. The French may claim otherwise, but Billy Wilder’s 1944 movie certainly owns the pedigree. Not only is it based on a novel by James M. Cain, the grandaddy of noir, but Raymond Chandler helped Wilder write the screenplay. You also have Barbara Stanwyck as a femme fatale who lures Fred MacMurray’s dopey insurance salesman into making an ill-fated decision, resulting in a Rube Goldberg-like string of destruction. All the elements are there in Double Indemnity, a simmering feast of cynicism served with a honeysuckle-scented knife twist.
When the movie begins, we see Walter Neff (MacMurray) staggering his way into a Los Angeles office building. It’s late at night and Walter is huddled inside an overcoat. He is either sick or injured. Walter limps into an office and collapses. A gunshot wound is visible on his shoulder. Sweaty and weak, Neff begins to relay the story of what happened to him into a memo machine, leaving a last testament of sorts for his boss to discover.
Walter works as an insurance salesman, a soulless profession that has him punch the clock by day only to return to his ratty apartment where he spends his nights alone. Walter is indifferent to the daily grind. He has no problem going from door to door and pushing policies. Even when his boss and friend Barton Keyes (an excellent Edward G. Robinson) offers him a promotion, Walter has no interest in a desk job. Despite peddling policies to the wealthy, Walter isn’t interested in selling himself out for a modest bump in salary. In America, there are other ways to get rich quick.
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Wilder explores the seamy underside of the American Dream in many of his films but never addresses it head on like he does in Double Indemnity. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1906, Wilder spent his young adult life in Berlin where he drove a cab, wrote for newspapers and then went to work in the film industry. He eventually relocated to Paris and then Los Angeles in 1933 just as Europe began to descend into World War II. Sadly, Wilder’s mother, grandmother and stepfather all perished in the Holocaust.
Despite being “saved” by the United States, Wilder’s films often examine the lies behind the country’s façade of “anyone with a dream can make it.” In movies from The Apartment to Ace in the Hole, Wilder examines the divided states of America, so to speak, in the way people of different classes, genders and ideologies are treated and often demonized. Though he often did not work in film noir, the genre suits Wilder’s worldview just fine, especially in a story like this one where a man, blinded by desire, is happy to commit murder for a woman he doesn’t know very well, one who is manipulating him all along but he is still dim to believe it.
So why does Walter cave so easily to the machinations Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck), a wealthy woman who wants to be rid of her husband? “Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars,” as MacMurray describes himself. Perhaps he sees killing Phyllis’ husband as a quick way to get rich, a way to rise above his station in a manner that is impossible to do simply with hard work. Walter sees the insurance game as a rat race, his life as stuck in neutral. Phyllis Dietrichson offers excitement. She offers a way out.
Unfortunately, Walter doesn’t realize that his resolve to burst free from the jail of selling insurance will likely land him in the penitentiary. His plan seems airtight at first – sell Mr. Dietrichson an insurance that pays double should he die on a train, kill the man and then make it look like he died in a locomotive accident. Despite misgivings from the head of the insurance company, Keyes buys Walter’s story at first but then cracks begin to show in his plan. With Keyes closing in, Walter realizes that he must act quick or he will be implicated in the murder of Mr. Dietrichson.
MacMurray, best known for appearing in Disney films and as likable dads on sitcoms, does well playing a total fraudster, chewing through Wilder and Chandler’s whip-smart dialogue with an ease that may seem like he’s sleepwalking through his performance. But that’s what makes Walter so dangerous. He never truly loves Phyllis. He is using her just like she is using him. Just as much as he wants to get rich, Walter is a salesman. He is in love with the con and the murder/fraud he plans with Phyllis would be his ultimate ploy. He also wants to outwit Keyes, an insurance investigator who has seen it all over the years and uses his gut to sniff out illicit claims.
In many ways, the relationship between Walter and Keyes is more interesting than that between the two supposed lovers. Keyes serves as a father figure who is looking out for Walter. Yet, Keyes never seems to have a match for his cigars. But Walter is always there with a match, ready to ignite it with his finger. At the end of the film, as Walter lays mortally wounded, Keyes is there with the match for him. And it’s here that Walter tells his boss that he loves him.
That love is more true than anything he feels for Phyllis. They meet when he comes to her large home to sell insurance. Almost immediately he is hitting on her in a scene that shows off Wilder and Chandler’s crackerjack dialogue. But if the quips are the foreplay, the murder of Phyllis’ husband is the actual sex. As Walter hides in the back seat of the Dietrichson car, he waits until Phyllis pulls into a dark alley to strangle her husband. Wilder cuts away right as Walter strikes, leaving his camera on Phyllis’ ecstatic face as her husband is killed. This is the apex of Walter and Phyllis’ relationship, the ultimate release.
Double Indemnity posits that if two people do something terrible together they are stuck on the train until the bitter final destination. There is no jumping off to safety. Walter is too busy getting off on power. Phyllis just wants her damned money. The train is barreling towards the station. The brakes have failed. The American Dream has sputtered into the night. There is only destruction brought on by destruction.
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