Fleapit revisited:Double Indemnity.

"Murder is never perfect. It always comes apart sooner or later. When two people are involved, it's usually sooner" - Barton Keyes.

Ominous music plays as a shadowy man on crutches limps towards us. The man, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) takes the elevator to a twelfth floor office of the Los Angeles insurance firm he works for, lights a cigarette, and begins to record a lengthy, and revelatory, message to his colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson).  

This message will tell a story of Glendale mansions, iced tea, car insurance, Mexican restaurants, bowling alleys, drive in bars (!?), morality, temptation, double crossing, adultery, betrayal, lust, and murder. It will tell the story of Neff's meeting with unhappily married Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and the plan the two of them contrive together to rid Dietrichson of her husband and share the insurance spoils his death will bring them.

But, of course, it's not that simple. Billy Wilder's 1944 Double Indemnity (based on a book by James M. Cain who also saw films made of his Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice) tells both the story of this insurance scam, the love (or lust) between Dietrichson and Neff, and the methodical unravelling of this egregious plot by Keyes.

Robinson is brilliant as Keyes, smoking huge cigars, waving his arms around, pacing urgently around his office, and talking twenty to the dozen. We see him masterfully use personal observations and investigations to debunk the fraudulent claims of an Inglewood truck driver, Sam Gorlopis (Fortunio Bonanova), and we see him, immediately, grow suspicious of Dietrichson's role in her husband's death.

Neff, though not as perceptive as Keyes, observes, almost poetically, everything he sees. The dust in the sun through the Venetian blinds, the stale smell of last night's cigars lingering in the air, and, most of all, the way Dietrichson's anklet digs in to her leg. He's not shy in telling her how much he likes that, or her dress, either and Dietrichson's equally quick to reciprocate.

Soon, he's calling her 'baby' at the end of nearly every sentence and they're plotting the end for Dietrichson's unloving, unlovely, and even unnamed, husband (Tom Powers). Dietrichson, from the off, appears manipulative and performative in her actions but Neff, and we - the audience, give her the benefit of the doubt.

Trapped in a loveless marriage in the 1930s, both frustrated and abused by her husband, it's hard not to. In a brilliant, groundbreaking, film perhaps the one thing that doesn't quite work is the love affair between Dietrichson and Neff. The passion seems a little forced, the clinches a touch unnatural. The romance lacks the all consuming emergency of genuine love, or even primal lust. Neff talks a good game but in scenes with Dietrichson he's often stiff - and not in that way. The Hays Code was still in place.

Perhaps that's intentional because as Double Indemnity develops, nudged along by a mostly unobtrusive score by Miklos Rozsa (see also:- Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis?, and Spellbound), the story takes some killer twists and turns as morality is played off against desire. It's tightly scripted, full of sparkling dialogue and tense, suspenseful, set pieces and though, in many ways, it's a police procedural (with claims adjusters standing in for gumshoes) it still manages to pack a hefty emotional punch.

At one point, I felt a genuine chill shoot up my back. Some credit should go to supporting actors:- Jean Heather as Lola (Mr Dietrichson's daughter from a previous marriage), Byron Barr as her problematic boyfriend Nino, Richard Gaines as Keyes and Neff's boss Edward Norton, Porter Hall as proud Oregon man and only potential witness to the murder Mr Jackson, and Sam McDaniel as garage attendant Charlie. Black people, presumably, being rarer in 1930s films than they were in 1930s California.

But the bulk of the credit should go to MacMurray, Stanwyck and, most of all, Robinson and director Wilder for creating a film that has gone to on become a benchmark of global cinema. It may be too slow burning for many modern audiences who have been spoonfed CGI, car chases, and superheroes beating the crap out of each other but I love that most of the action takes places in the exchanges of words between the characters and I admire that Double Indemnity presumes both a curiosity and an intellect in its audience.

I'd watched the film once before, something like thirty years ago, and remembered that I'd enjoyed it even as I could barely recall the plot. Revisiting it was a joy and for that I should thank the Internet Archive, an American digital library headquartered in San Francisco which contains a sprawling body of work taking in books, games, software apps, and thousands of films ranging from Ed Wood's Glen and Glenda to Fritz Lang's M and taking in anything from Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer to The Wizard of Oz on the way. There's lots of film noir on there too and some of it will be equal in quality to Double Indemnity. I'll be diving back in, for sure.