SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, you may not want to read further until you’ve seen it.

I know this is a rather obvious choice as my first film noir to become the sole focus of one of my Sunday Updates: if we ran a poll of a thousand avid noir fans, this one would almost certainly come out top. It tells the story of an insurance salesman, Walter Neff, who falls into the clutches of a classic femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson, and they plot to murder the woman’s husband and collect the insurance money. There is one more key figure, that of Barton Keyes, who is a claims manager for the insurance company and performs the dramatic role which is normally assigned to a detective in this kind of movie (this use of an insurance investigator as detective also happens in another noir, The Killers). The film is based on a novella by hard-boiled writer, James M. Cain, directed by Billy Wilder, and scripted by Wilder in collaboration with Raymond Chandler.

One of the key reasons why I love this movie is the triangle between the three main characters and the performances of the actors who play them. Fred MacMurray, who plays Neff, was a far from charismatic actor but his easy charm and sense of shallow self-confidence made him a perfect choice for a character who is used to switching on that charm to get a sale and whose inflated sense of his own ability means that he doesn’t realise how much he is out of his depth as he flirts with Phyllis Dietrichson at the beginning of the film. He comes across as what we would call in the UK ‘a Jack the Lad’, with a slick but obvious charm, an eye for the main chance with the ladies, an attraction for dodgy get-rich-quick schemes, and a desire as he terms it to ‘crook the house’. His lust as he watches Phyllis walk down the staircase, her anklet shining in the dim light, makes him a fly for her spider’s web, while later, when they agree to commit the murder, proving himself smart enough to beat the system and to out-think his boss seems at least as important to him as the lure of the insurance payout. As the movie progresses, however, MacMurray does an excellent job of showing how Neff gradually becomes aware of the peril in which he finds himself and how he has been played for a fool.

Keyes, the investigator played by Edward G. Robinson, is the kind of man who lives to work rather than works to live. He can reel off actuarial tables with the ease that many Americans can repeat the Pledge of Allegiance after years of doing it at school. If this suggests that he is something of a faceless robot, nothing could be farther from the truth: he is an animated figure with an obsessive passion for insurance and especially for foiling the scams of people who take out policies in the hope of cheating their way to easy cash. In one way he is stern and inhumane, as is shown in an early scene when he dismisses a small-time cheat he has exposed as a would-be scammer with the indifference with which he might swat a fly, and yet his obvious affection for Neff comes through in all the scenes they share together and shows a person who has deep feelings and strong allegiances. The relationship between them is like that between father and son, with the conventional and morally strict parent trying to get his wayward, reckless child to settle down.

There is an air of loneliness about Keyes and yet he has found his niche in life and wouldn’t change it. Robinson, a first-rate actor who had so much more to offer than merely being a depicter of gangsters, suggests these nuances of the character with consummate ease. Keyes’ record as a claims investigator is exemplary in the sense that, like a good detective, ‘he always gets his man’. In this case, though, he never suspects Walter Neff of being the murderer. When Neff confesses to the murder and tells Keyes that he didn’t solve this one because the perpetrator was too close, Keyes taps his heart and says ‘Closer than that, Walter’. Yet even in the scene in which his surrogate son lies bleeding to death on the floor while still fantasising about escape to Mexico, there is something of the immovable moral crusader in Keyes despite his love for Neff. (The film ends here, although an earlier final scene was originally shot which showed Neff being executed in a gas chamber, but, fortunately in my view because this would have spoiled the formal tightness of the film by broadening it out beyond the claustrophobic world which it portrays, this scene was eventually scrapped.)

The third angle of the triangle, Phyllis Dietrichson, is played with icy precision by Barbara Stanwyck. Often in noir there are twists and turns of plot when a woman who seems faithful turns out to be a villainess, but this is never the case in Double Indemnity: we sense all along that Phyllis is a wrong ‘un. For many actresses, the temptation to make this plain through crude gestures of the eyes and face would have been hard to resist, but Stanwyck hints at her rotten heart purely by her iciness of demeanour. The scene where she is driving the car and staring at the road ahead while she can hear Neff murdering her husband beside her is genuinely chilling, with the tiniest movement of her mouth and a sudden shine in her eyes the only signal of her pleasure when she knows that the deed is done. Later in the movie, we find that she had been the nurse for her husband’s bedridden first wife and had effectively killed her by leaving the window of the room open in sub-zero temperatures, and that she has also been having an affair with her stepdaughter’s boyfriend so that he can become the fall-guy when she murders Neff. She’s a monster but the restraint with which Stanwyck portrays her means that the movie never stumbles into theatrical excess. In some ways it feels more like a documentary than a melodrama.

We have seen her husband briefly as he signs the insurance policy which will lead to his demise, and he is thoroughly unpleasant, but we never feel any sympathy for Phyllis trapped in her boring life beside him. She is far too composed and calculating for us to empathise with her, and the frigid veneer never cracks. In one scene she is summoned to the office of a bigwig in the insurance company where he threatens her with legal action unless she signs a document accepting that her husband committed suicide and agrees to a smaller settlement. She handles the situation with aplomb, wiping the floor completely with the buffoonish executive and storming with wounded righteousness out of the room.

I shall briefly detour here to discuss a detail of the film that divides film noir aficionados: the blond wig that Stanwyck wears throughout the movie. This looks cheap and vulgar in the extreme, as if it is made from some sort of acrylic rather than human hair, and many fans find it creates a distance between themselves and the character which ruins their suspension of disbelief. My own feeling, for what it’s worth, is the wig works perfectly to suggest her heartlessness and falseness, a signifier of her true inner nature, and prevents us as viewers from ever being tempted to see her as victim. It also serves to highlight the cocky naivety and over-confidence of Walter Neff as he is lured to the rocks by this scheming lorelei.

Although the cinematography of the movie is of the highest quality throughout, Double Indemnity has a visual starkness that is not common in film noir even though it contains many of noir’s defining features such as sunlight through venetian blinds and chiaroscuro lighting. It also makes use of flashback, another classic film noir trope. The movie begins with Neff, mortally wounded, walking through the corridors of the empty insurance company at night, and then speaking his story into a dictaphone. This turns the whole of the film, except for a few moments at the very end, into a flashback, but the plot is very simple by noir standards and there is none of the dizzy confusion of movies like The Big Sleep. Nor is there much distortion or use of expressionist techniques. At the risk of sounding pretentious, there is an austerity about the movie which reminds me of Greek tragedy, as its central character, Neff, plummets to his fate as a result of his hamartia, his fatal flaw, in this case a mix of lust, over-confidence and greed, even if in terms of social status he is more Willy Loman than Oedipus the King.

Another aspect of Double Indemnity which it shared with Greek tragedy, and which is quintessentially noir, is its sense of a Fate that can never be escaped. From the pounding, plodding music at the very start as Neff struggles to walk through the endless, faceless anonymity of the insurance company to the last scene as he tries in desperation to crawl towards the lift, there is a sense of inevitability about what happens, made all the stronger by the fact that the entire movie is a flashback. At one point Neff’s voiceover says that ‘the machinery had started to move and nothing would stop it’ and elsewhere that, as he left the Dietrichson mansion, he couldn’t hear his own footsteps: ‘It was the walk of a dead man.’ This sense of inescapable doom is reinforced by a metaphor and image that is repeated again and again in the script: a train on its track to its final destination, ‘the end of the line’. Keyes, ever the avenging angel, spells it out: ‘The last stop is the cemetery.’

Another way in which Double Indemnity differs from many film noir is its lack of a night-life realm of night clubs and criminals and hoodlums. There are no ‘dames’ warbling songs in sleazy, smoky bars or chases through badly-lit streets which end in the death of some random lowlife. Two of the most famous scenes take place in a supermarket where Walter and Phyllis have agreed to secretly meet once Keyes is on the case with his investigator’s instinct for when something doesn’t smell right so they cannot be seen in public together. Double Indemnity is not a glimpse for suburban audiences into a dangerous but exciting demi-monde: it is normal life gone wrong, the poison that lies hidden beneath everyday reality.

The only slither of light in a very dark film comes in the person of Phyllis’ stepdaughter, Lola, something of an innocent in this world of corrupted adults, Cordelia to Phyllis’ Goneril. Even so, I always get the feeling that she is there to progress the plot as much as to provide a moral contrast to those around her, for at times she seems motivated more by hatred of Phyllis than love of her father. It is through her that Neff begins to learn about Phyllis’ shady past and her deeply dissolute character. A naive and vulnerable teenage girl with a good heart but little experience of the world, Lola is secretly dating a surly, aggressive boy named Zanetti behind her father’s back. Unbeknown to her, however, Zanetti is also seeing Phyllis every night at the Dietrichson house, another fly in her spider’s web whom she is planning to set up to take the rap when she murders Neff. But in his one brief moment of nobility in the film, Neff warns Zanetti off and tells him to get as far away as possible from the Dietrichson house so that he has an alibi.

Double Indemnity is a wonderfully tight film on all levels: direction, acting, lighting, camerawork, script. It draws us into its sordid world and never let its tension drop for a moment. Next week I will discuss another famous film noir, D.O.A, with a very different rhythm and style, and a furious, action-packed pace that lacks the sombre discipline of Double Indemnity but ultimately sends out the same message: There’s no point trying to bargain with or try to escape Fate because it will always get you in the end.