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- [00:10]
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Welcome to out of the Past Investigating Film Noir, where each podcast investigates a particular film in relation to the body of film noir. Today's episode, Double Indemnity. This week we will be discussing in our podcast the film noir Double Indemnity. This was a film initially released in 1944 by Paramount Studios, and it was directed by the sublime Billy Wilder. In my opinion, it's one of the best films Billy Wilder ever directed. And this was only his, actually, only his third film that he directed in Hollywood. He was already getting a bit of a reputation as a screenwriter, but this was only the third film that he directed. And what a film it was. Like many of the film noir offerings that we'll be discussing on this podcast, this film has incredible, incredible literary bloodlines. This film was written by Billy Wilder, one of the most awarded screenwriters in film history. He was nominated for 13 Academy Awards throughout his career for Best screenplay, along with the great writer James M. Cain, who actually wrote the source material of which Double Indemnity is based on another person who collaborated on this green play was another person who was well known for his dark fiction, which is Raymond Chandler. And so the three of them form a very formidable trio. For one of the reasons why Double Indemnity has such a crackerjack plot and such sizzling dialogue in terms of just setting up the film a little bit, we would be remiss if we didn't actually discuss a little bit the fine acting turns done by the three major stars of this film, which are Barbara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, and Edward G. Robinson, all of them doing close to career best in Double Indemnity and forming the central triangle that motivates this wonderful tale of death and deceit and all of the great morbid details that film noir is known for. In this podcast, I'm here with my colleague Shannon Kloot, and I really want to think about the ways in which a film like Double Indemnity operates as an. An archetypal type of film noir. There are so many things in this film that were imitated after this film achieved its success in 1944. But interestingly, this probably wasn't the type of film that one would maybe hypothesize as being a huge favorite, especially a huge audience favorite in 1944. We're still embroiled in World War II. The Hollywood films at this era tend to be the more triumphal war films or escapist fare that really tried to alleviate the minds of many Americans at the close of World War II. And here, along Comes a film like Double Indemnity that is a very dark film which has a very cynical murder, if you want to call it that, at the heart of its plot. It's the classic femme fatale story told with a couple incredible twists. And yet one of the things that comes up in my mind is how do we account for this type of film coming into being during World War II? One element definitely has to be Billy Wilder himself coming out of a European tradition, having a sense of German expressionism and slightly darker or more what might be called sophisticated narratives in European cinema versus some of the by the book Hollywood plots is something that I'm very interested in as I start to think about the place of film noir, or within both its era of ascendancy, which is the period from 1941 to 1958, but also its continuing impact on film history even today. So I think that the element that I kind of want to branch off of, even right away, is what makes this such a classic film noir. I mean, what is it within this tale? And I think one of the first things that I would seize upon would be looking at even the opening credits sequence, where I think even before this film is five minutes old, you already have a sense of all of the things you need to know in order to experience and read this film and really get the heart of what this film is after. And you know, the opening sequence shows a silhouetted man on two crutches, which has a lot of double meanings all throughout the film. But it's this incredibly stark image, absolutely iconic. It's against a washed out background. So it's really just this silhouetted man with crutches. And then the title Double Indemnity flares up on the screen. And then you get into the character of Fred McMurray, who, as Walter Neff, begins the film at its ending, or actually I should say begins the film a few minutes before its ending, where you start to get the story told in flashback and voiceover of what happened coming out of this character who walks in late one night with one of the greatest characters in film history. And here I'm talking not only of Fred McMurray's Walter Neff, but but of the city of Los Angeles. This is a wonderful film that very much right from the opening frame shows you Los Angeles in all of her World War II glory, the streetcars and the dark electrified nights. And it's just this wonderful documentary realist scene that then cuts to Walter Neff walking into Pacific all risk insurance company, where the film starts with Fred McMurray actually dictating the story of the film.
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This is Shannon Kloot, and I'd like to pick up on a lot of the things Richard said in case it's not clear to the general audience. A name like Billy Wilder can sound so American. So we probably ought to clarify how it is that he had this background with European film. He was in fact born in Galicia, Austria, Hungary, which is an area that is currently part of Poland, and had worked closely with the German realist film movement before coming to the States. So as Richard said, he brought with him a different sensibility, one that was largely allergic to the Hollywood happy ending and had a different manner of lighting the actors and the scenes and of framing the actors. So it was a different sensibility from the very beginning. In terms of the specifics of this film. I'd like to pick up on what Richard said about the writing of the script. This is perhaps one of the most script driven films that I have ever seen. And I should state for the record up front, I might as well just wear my heart on my sleeve. To my mind, Chandler is perhaps the greatest stylist of any genre in the 20th century. In America, he's that good. And although the writing credit goes primarily to Wilder and to Caine, on whose novel this script is based on, really, Chandler is all over this script. For fans of Chandler, you can hear the one liners that just ring Chandler. And although Chandler and Wilder had a series of disputes over the way that this script should turn in the course of the writing of the script and the shooting of the film, ultimately Chandler won most of those disputes. And Kane himself later said that had he thought of some of the plot twists and the narrative structuring devices that that Chandler thought of, he would have written them himself. And he thought that it was actually a superior product because of those. One of those Richard touched on, which is the Dictaphone. This story is told, as Richard said, in flashback from a point just before the denouement. And this is important because it simultaneously builds tension in that the viewer knows that even once he has all of the background, he doesn't know how it's going to end. And it shows that every man is a product of his past. And I think that's one of the most important themes that runs throughout the film noir style.
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And I'm with you there, Shannon, because I think one of the things that I find stunning and where I actually like locating Dublin Dumnity initially as a writing driven vehicle is that one of the things that makes Double Indemnity, such an incredible film is it transcends its mere literariness. And I don't mean any disrespect by using the word mirror, but it's not a talking film. One of the things that is so sensational about this film is it's really being released in a Hollywood that is heavily policed by censorship. And as you're watching, this film noir in particular, maybe more than a lot of other film noirs, or maybe in keeping with almost all of the types of film noirs that we're going to be talking about over the course of this series, is the idea that the characters could say one thing and the director can show another. There is so much dialogue that on the page, it's absolutely splendidly written, but all the words are played against by the actions of the actors by the way the scene is lit. And so you get a sense, in a film like Double Indemnity, what would a censor even be able to cut out of the script? Because the script, on some level, is amazingly innocuous. What makes some of the crackerjack dialogue so potent and what makes this genre, this style of filmmaking, when it goes into a genre like the crime thriller, so powerful, is that you can have a conversation between two characters, like between Fred McMurray's Walter and Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis, in which they're really not saying anything that's too rac on the page, but when you watch them on the screen and the way that they're touching each other, the way they're looking at each other, the way they are lit, you realize that it's not only that there are verbal double entendres, but there are visual double entendres. And that it's just this great moment that is one of the reasons why I think I'm such a huge fan of noir and as a style of filmmaking.
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Yeah, I would agree with all those points. And I think that this script, I mean, it could be likened to many things, and of course, metaphor is always a dangerous road to travel, but there's something like it that's like a diary to me. It's so hard and impenetrable that, like you say, the censors wouldn't have had any one line that they could have extracted. And yet that very structure, the density of the script, is also what makes it have its sheen, in a sense, it's what gives it its sparkle. But let me talk a little bit, then about that script, since we've talked about how script driven this film is and how early on film noir itself is so indebted to the hard boiled fiction that developed in the pulps in the 20s and 30s in America. Let's talk just a little bit about what the aspects of that script are or what the aspects may be. The best way to say it of a typical hard boiled detective fiction would be this has many of them in spades. And yet, like Richard said, it also plays with those visually and against those visually. It's the story of this insurance agent, Walter Neff, who. The film opens and there's a car careening out of control through Los Angeles. That's the part we didn't mention. And there's a stoplight. And it's a stoplight that I think
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it could only be careening back then. Nowadays it would be stuck in traffic.
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There you go. The stoplight is probably not even historically accurate. It's the old fashioned kind where an arm actually raises up from the side and says stop. As far as I know, those were out of Los Angeles long before that. But it makes a great visual cue. Here's this car that comes tearing down this road out of control just before dawn. And the stop arm goes up, the car doesn't stop, narrowly misses a truck that almost takes it off the road. And you realize already that whoever is behind the wheel is out of control and is a danger not only to himself, but to others. And that, of course, is Walter Neff. He gets to the office, he goes upstairs, he sits down at a Dictaphone and he starts to tell his story. And the beauty of this is that he tells it like as is true with most hard boiled detective fiction in the first person, which makes it immediate, it makes it very approachable. And he tells it through just one level of mediation. That is, he's got a Dictaphone and he's sitting there speaking into a machine. But he's intending to reach somebody to whom he's very close. And because of that, I think it brings the spectator into the film. We like Keys, Walter Keyes, or, excuse me, what is Keys first name? Well, in any case, Keyes is the insurance investigator who's a close friend of Neff. And Neff is telling the story to Keys.
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Barton Keyes.
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Barton Keyes. And because of that, there's this machine that just one machine that stands between Neff and Key Keys. Likewise, there's just the one machine that is the camera that stands between Neff and the audience. And I think that we're sort of analogous to Keyes in a sense. This story is being told to us so that we can unravel the mystery, just like the story that's being told by Neff to Keys so that he can unravel the mystery. What makes this so appealing, besides that narrative structure, is Chandler's ability to write the perfect one liner. Typical of all film noir is a protagonist who's already. He's a generally good guy, but he has good and bad in him until the moment when either greed or desire pushes him over the edge and he becomes more bad than good. Clearly, that's what Walter Neff is. And there's a great line near the beginning when he starts telling his story into the Dictaphone for Keyes, for Barton Keyes to hear, and he says, I killed him for money and a woman, but I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. And I think that is just sort of this iconic moment in film noir and also in hard boiled detective writing, it just sort of sums it up in a sense. And that's where the film starts. We don't want to give away where it ends yet, but that's. I think it starts off with just these great visual and script clues to where we're heading.
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Well, see, what's really interesting to me is the way that you're approaching this look at Double Indemnity via the script really starts to reveal just how many layers there are in a great film noir. And of course, in a short podcast like this, we can't deal with all of the complexity of Double Indemnity. In fact, if we wanted to get to everything in Double Indemnity, we'd have to have probably just 100 podcasts on this one film alone. But I like zeroing in on this film in terms of its narrative design for even yet another reason, which is that this film has so many of the key constitutive features of film noir. One of the elements of film noir, which we're going to slowly try and approach a definition of over the course of several of these podcasts, and you've already heard some of our definitions, and now, you know, we're going to be looking to kind of continue our investigation into what film noir means. But in so many of the classic embodiments of this genre, you have doomed, fatalistic protagonists who are metaphorically or literally dead at the beginning of a movie. Of course, the most famous narrator of all of noir is William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, who actually is dead and narrating from beyond the grave. We don't quite have that Metaphorical richness. Correct. That is also Billy Wilder, 1950, six years after double Indemnity. But what really excites me about Double Indemnity is it has that quintessential classic voiceover. And what voiceover gives you in a noir is the same element that is in a great short story. It's this access to this subjective narrative voice. There is nothing in the guise of Fred McMurray's Walter Neff, who has all the answers. This is not an omniscient narrator. This is a flawed narrator who is telling you a tale of doom and woe. And one of the things that I think makes this genre so appealing is that as you're watching the film, you really get the idea that there is nothing that this character can do to stop the chain of events. And one of the great single lines is, you know, that's repeated over and over again, is straight down the line. They're going to follow all of the steps straight down the line. And then early part of the film. That's a somewhat optimistic phrase that increasingly comes to mean something different over the development of the narrative of the film. And I just want to say that even though we're not really addressing the totality of this film and kind of looking right now at just one narrow aspect, I think that's what's really interesting about talking about film is how many different ways you can look at this massive object.
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I tend to watch movies a lot like I read books. You know, figuring out what angle to take with a great work can be a daunting task. So I tend to focus on brief scenes or even a single shot that function somehow as a microcosm of the whole and thereby allow me to give a detailed analysis of a theme or a filmic particularity that runs throughout. So I'm going to do that right now. Without further ado, there's an interesting. I mean, we've done it already, right? When we talk about the image of the car that's just, you know, driving out of control, that's one of these moments. There's a great moment when he. When Neff first goes to the house of Mrs. Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck, and played brilliantly. She was nominated for Best Actress for this. And the first time we see her is from his point of view. He's just entered the house and the maid's given him a hard time. He's allowed to enter, and then Mrs. Dietrichson appears on a balcony above him. And this is a classic scene often discussed. What's so interesting from a narrative point of view is that when the camera cuts from his point of view to hers, you see that she's above him in space, and you sense that she's above him in power. And not only do you understand that she's above him, that he'll always somehow be at her feet, you understand what the source of that power is. She comes in from having sunbathe, she's scantily clad in just a towel, and you understand that he's not only at her feet, but he's a victim of her seductive powers, in a sense. And really, that sets up the whole narrative. There are a series of touches like this where, like Richard said, the dialogue seems innocuous, and yet the camera is showing you that there's something much more going on than that.
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Right. And again, you know, we can't even really do justice without really starting to literally quote lines from the script. The writing in this film is absolutely some of the best writing in film history, which is actually very. Another element that is part of film noir that I think is important to recognize, which is a lot of people might say, hey, people in real life, they don't talk like this. Who talks like Fred McMurray talks to Barbara Stanwyck? And yet, one of the things that I think is really amazing is that I think much of the great hard boiled writing that is at the heart of film noir is the same as Shakespearean writing. Who talked like Shakespeare in Elizabethan England? No one did. And yet you recognize that in this heightened attention to language and how even the simplest lines have meanings that you can never fully unfurl. At exactly the end of the scene that Shannon mentions, when the protagonist of Walter Neff, played by Fred McMurray, meets Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck, their exchange ends with two of my favorite lines in all of film history. When, in essence, Walter Neff is propositioning Phyllis after her seduction, one would say of him. And Phyllis says, I wonder if I know what you mean. And Fred McMurray's comeback is one of the great ones. I wonder if you wonder. And I think that really starts to speak of the type of universe and the type of values and the type of play between morality and amorality that is at the heart of film noir.
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Yeah, the line that follows that one is wonderful, too. He. Because this is all told in flashback as Keyes, or, excuse me, as Neff drives away from that first meeting with Mrs. Dietrichsen, he says, how could I? He's speaking, of course, into the dictaphone to keys. And he says, how could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle? I mean, if that doesn't sum it up, I don't know what does. It's this great mix of seduction and danger. And there are so many visual cues that are both as subtle and as stylized as that narrative. I would just mention briefly that at the moment when the decision is finally made, when Neff decides he's going along with a plot to do harm to Mrs. Dietrichson's husband, and that he's going to, as an insurance investigator, help her commit this crime for insurance, he opens the door to her and you realize that he's done for, that he's decided to sign on. She comes into the apartment and suddenly she's wearing pants. Now, it's a subtle cue, but it's kind of interesting. She was dressed scantily and in first a towel, then in a skirt. Now suddenly, at the moment, she really forces the action, she's wearing pants also in that scene. Suddenly, Neff is being filmed in profile often, and she's being filmed face forward, which is sort of the classic framing of the male protagonist, the active player. And so it shows. It's this subtle clue, this subtle visual clue that suddenly she's in charge. She's wearing the pants, if you will. And what's interesting about it, too, is that although she's face forward and is clearly the one pushing the action, she's also in that same scene, often in shadow. So you can see that she's at once active and shady. Well, it repeats in the final scene. In a later showdown with Neff, there's a final showdown between the two where you realize they're about to split ways and that this whole double cross might double cross both players. And again, she's wearing pants, and again she's filmed face forward. So there are all these subtle visual clues that either reinforce or contradict the more ostensible storyline in the script. It's a wonderful film.
- [24:58]
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We, in essence, started this conversation in Media Race. We started in the middle of the action. There hasn't been a lot of signposts, but if I were to start to put some summarizing thoughts on the preceding minutes of this podcast, the first one would be, please go out, if you haven't done so already, and watch Double Indemnity.
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And then buy it.
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And then buy it. It's an absolutely fantastic film that is one of the truly great films in film history. Just in one of those weird bits of trivia on the Internet movie database IMDb.com it's ranked 41st in all of film history as one of the great films ever made, a top hundred film of all time, which is very unique for a film noir. It was also nominated for seven Academy Awards, among them Best Picture, Best Director, Best Acting nomination, Actress and Screenplay, and won none of them. So it was nominated for seven and was completely shut out by that masterpiece we all watch over and over again going my way. So you can see that the Academy doesn't always gets it right. It got it wrong in 1944, and I'm sure in many of the other subsequent years. The final thing that I wanted to mention is I like that we paid a lot of attention this week to the role of dialogue and to the literary nature of film noir, even though we haven't really yet fully even discussed what film noir is, which might hopefully be a reason for you guys to come back and listen to us again to see as Shannon and I work out precisely what film noir is as an informal conversation, I hope you start to recognize that among one of the key elements of its attraction and why so many people are real big fans of this genre, is that this isn't a genre that, you know, pardon what might sound like a pun, that is written lightly. These are some. Some of these films, such as Double Indemnity, are written by some of the true masters of 20th century literature. But because they worked in what Quentin Tarantino, of course, has now forever, you know, appropriated, as in Pulp Fiction, they might not necessarily always get their due. But the other element that is really fascinating about appreciating a film like Double Indemnity is going back and reading some of the source material. Go pick up a book by Caine or Chandler or Hammett and recognize that what the movies do is give this glorious vision, this incredible black and white palette, and use it to its greatest potential ever. You've been listening to Richard Edwards, assistant Professor of communication at St. Mary's College, and my colleague, Shannon Kloot, assistant Professor of modern languages at St. Mary's College. Today we discussed Double Indemnity, released in 1944 by Paramount Studios, directed by Billy Wilder, written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by James M. Kane. Cinematography by John F. Seitz. Starring Fred McMurray as Walter Neff, Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes. Next podcast, we will discuss Batman Begins. Don't look back, baby.
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Don't ever look back.