Double Indemnity
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?Over at the New York Times, DVD reviewer Dave Kehr takes a look at the new release of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. This aint no My Three Sons Fred MacMurray. Actually Wilder pulled the best out of MacMurray — here and in The Apartment.
Billy Wilder’s 1944 “Double Indemnity” belongs to the early stages of American film noir, coming only four years after “Stranger on the Third Floor,” a 1940 RKO B-picture directed by Boris Ingster now regarded by most scholars as the first Hollywood film with an appropriately depressive noir spirit (as opposed to stylishly executed, traditional murder mysteries like “I Wake Up Screaming”).
The key figure of the femme fatale was introduced by John Huston in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and further developed by Otto Preminger in “Laura” (1944), but it is probably in Wilder’s film that the archetype comes most sharply into focus: Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson seems a pure product of hallucination, a shapely California blonde (with a memorable anklet) who claims to have been born and bred in Los Angeles but has not shaken her Brooklyn accent.
Pure evil (she admits at one point that she has never been capable of love and has loved no one), Phyllis sinks her hooks into the insurance salesman Walter Neff (played by an out-of-his-depth Fred MacMurray), convincing him to go along with a mad-sounding plot to murder her abusive husband and collect the death benefit. Walter, like so many noir heroes, finds that, against his better judgment, he just can’t resist the siren call of her sexuality, and comes on board — for a road that proves far bumpier, thanks to the ingenious plotting of James M. Cain’s original novel, than anything Walter could have anticipated.
Source: NYtimes