Spoiler Alert: My three murders!

Movie: Double Indemnity

Rank: 29

Year: 1944

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

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I interrupt your regularly scheduled quarantine to bring you the latest iteration of this blog. This blog, which most days I wonder why I started. Yet, as goes the old parental adage every child has ever heard, I made a commitment. Worse, I made that commitment publicly.

Nonetheless, I am here on day 1,543,296 of this hellish quarantine (I say, fully accepting its importance and my privilege, yet also acknowledging my truth as an extrovert in isolation) to discuss this film noir about insurance fraud. Oh, I guess murder, too. Insurance fraud and murder.

When I started life as a shut-in, I assumed I would power through these with the greatest of ease. Instead, I fell back into old binging habits. My poison of choice? Television. Barefoot wine may disagree, but we are going with television. I have watched nine shows, of varying length, in their entirety whilst also keeping up with my weekly shows and viewing old comforts. Yet, I know I need to get back on the horse and remember how to ride that bike. So, I sit here in the middle of the night as usual, writing about a movie I have now watched for the second time, with months having passed since my first viewing.

With a barren face and frizzy hair, I took my spot on my pink velvet couch collapsing from old age, clad only in my quarantine uniform of a shapeless pink Comfy.  If you don’t know what a Comfy is, please educate yourself. There is no room for ignorance on this blog. Then, I clicked play.  

"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?"

- Walter Neff, Double Indemnity

Coming into this movie with basically no knowledge or assumptions, the legitimate first thought to cross my mind was whether or not this was the dad from My Three Sons. If you don’t have any idea what this show is and if you did not get the dad joke worthy pun in the title, then this is probably further proof Mandy, of Titanic infamy, and I were a quirky duo in our (not so) youth who enjoyed black and white familial comedies. 

This, however, is not My Three Sons. As I have discovered, it is a shadowy film full of lies and crimes, largely regarded as the best film noir. Instead of My Three Sons’ patriarch, Steve Douglas, Fred MacMurray played Walter Neff. Neff, a 35-year-old insurance salesman who stumbles into his office after-hours, only interacting with the cleaning crew. Once at his desk, he starts to dictate a confession. We may not know who, but we do know what. It was not an accident or suicide, but rather murder. We also know the why, money and a woman, neither of which he got. The when? Last May.

As the frame structure of this film is established, we are met with a great piece of narration, “How could I have known murder sometimes smells like honeysuckle?” In an effort to renew an insurance policy, he drives up to a house that looks ripped right out of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (despite referencing this movie, not even Leo could make me okay with the many problems and gratuitous violence of a Quentin Tarantino film). He comments that the house must have cost like $30,000. I have student loans greatly exceeding that quantity, oh how times have indeed changed. Anyways, once he gets to the house, Mr. Dietrichson is not home. His wife, however, is available, even if only clad in a towel.  Despite Neff realizing Phyllis Dietrichson hinting at a murder plot, he falls hard and fast. I mean, really, really fast. Her kibble and bits (euphuism for vulva and vagina) must be mixed with magic beans given how quickly their affair turns to a murder plot, even with her claims of abuse.

"I picked you for the job, not because I think you're so darn smart, but because I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. Guess I was wrong. You're not smarter, Walter... you're just a little taller."

- Barton Keyes, Double Indemnity

ERROR ALERT: Despite claiming to be unmarried, Neff appears to have a wedding ring on in one scene. Upon some deep investigative journalism, or the trivia section of IMDb, this was simply production forgetting to have MacMurray take off his actual wedding ring.

How do you get away with murder? You trick a man into signing a new life insurance policy, with a double indemnity clause which allows for a double payout under specific circumstances such as a falling off of a train, when he renews his auto policy. You then sneak out and lay in the back of your lover’s car, so when she goes to drive her husband to the train station, you can sit up to break his neck. You then take over his identity, crutches and all, to make your way to the back of the train and fall off at the proper time. You then move the dead body to the proper location. Easy, right?

The issue, Neff’s coworker and mentor, Keyes, has a “little guy” in his gut who knows something is off. Suspicions are instantly put onto the wife.

Mr. Dietrichson’s daughter, Lola, then reaches out to Neff and recalls an ominous story of Phyllis preparing for mourning while serving as a nurse to Lola’s still-living mother. Once her mother died, Phyllis was ready to be his next wife. She also discovers her boyfriend, Nino, having relations with Phyllis. Neff eventually realizes the plot, to have Nino framed for the crime.

Neff goes to confront Phyllis, who claims to have never loved Neff or anyone else. This changes, or at least she claims, when she is unable to shoot Neff for a second time. How romantic. He then turns around and shoots her.  He sees Nino arriving and tells him to go call Lola.

Poor Lola, this naïve as fuck woman is dating a guy who seems to be, by most accounts, a douche bag. Her mother was killed by her stepmother and her father was killed by her dad’s insurance agent in conjunction with her stepmother. Not knowing who to seek guidance from, she turns to said insurance agent.

Time catches up and we see the recently shot Neff telling his story when he looks back, almost as if directly into the camera. To quote my notes, “dun, dun, dun, it’s Keyes.” Neff tries to stop Keyes from calling authorities, deluding himself he has time to run away to Mexico. Not making it out the door, Keyes flicks a match with his finger (Is this a fire hazard?) to light a collapsed Neff’s cigarette. Will he live or die, who knows?

"Know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell ya. 'Cause the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya."

- Walter Neff, Double Indemnity

After having seen the crime play out, it is clear the shadowy figure in the opening of a man with crutches and a cast is really foreshadowing Neff’s impersonation of Mr. Dietrichson. This first of many shadowy figures, as light and dark are pivotal to the success of this film.

Coming out just a few years after Citizen Kane, a hallmark film for lighting, the stark contrast of light and dark in the black and white world echoed the moral ambiguity often put forward in the film. As he enters his office in the beginning of the film, his shadow is prominently cast. As he sat in the back seat preparing to kill Mr. Dietrichson, his face is largely shaded as he transitions from the theoretical into the actual criminal and murderer he planned. He is also largely darkened in the confrontation scene with Phyllis, a moment when he completely descends as he kills her. It is also just moody as hell to have all of the shadows of the blinds cast against walls and faces throughout the film.

Whilst the previously viewed Chinatown certainly fits the film noir mold, this really embodies and, in many ways, defines the genre. Barbara Stanwyck is the quintessential femme fatale, a seductive woman who brings danger and downfall to her lover. Her lover, so easily buying into a murder plot, certainly fits into the cynical anti-hero archetype of these type of protagonists. With the frame structure flashbacking to the plot, crime and aftermath, it fits the often complex and nonlinear structure of a film noir.

I know a major trope of the genre is this sex appeal and seduction, but there is something hard to grasp about a movie with affairs and murders preceding the era of I Love Lucy, famous for its separate marital beds. Maybe it is the forward-thinking magic of Billy Wilder who plays around with queer relationships in Some Like it Hot and directs other, I'm sure groundbreaking, films on the list.  

Now would be a good time for Tim Burton-esque jazzy skeletons to enter singing about murders most foul. Burton films, among many crime procedurals and modern adaptations of the genre, demonstrate the influence of this era and this film. And maybe watch your back if honeysuckle lingers in the air.