The two greatest genres in classic Hollywood cinema are the western and the film noir. An exemplary instance of the latter is Double Indemnity. It is, along with another noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilder’s most celebrated film, and it’s close to being his masterpiece. Wilder and mystery writer Raymond Chandler based their script on James M. Cain’s 1935 novel, although they changed a good deal, including the ending and the names of the characters. (In turn, Cain had based his book on an actual 1920s murder case.) Cain praised their script for being superior to his novel. Indeed, this may be the most brilliant movie script ever written for an American film.
Six years hence, Sunset Boulevard would be narrated by a man shot to death. Double Indemnity is narrated—as a long confession into an insurance office Dictaphone—by a man who has been shot and is as good as dead. Words and blood are pouring out of Walter Neff as he gives his “take” on the crime of murder in which he has been involved. An insurance salesman, Neff apparently, along with the man’s wife, murdered a client of his. I say apparently because anyone who takes this man’s word for anything is a fool. Against the sacred notion of the verity of a soul’s deathbed confession three facts contend: Neff is a murderer, a proven liar whose “confession” is bound to include self-serving elements; Neff’s rapid blood loss is bound to affect his memory; Neff’s perception of reality has always been (as ours is) conditioned by predispositions and prejudices. It’s plain to see that Neff’s “confession” is as much accusation as confession. The target of this character assassination is his alleged accomplice and lover, Phyllis Dietrichson, whom he has just shot to death, in a clinch, at point-blank range to erase the possibility of any airing of her side of the story. The narrative set-up of this remarkable film ensures, simultaneously, daunting clarity and endless ambiguity.
Neff’s misadventure is driven by fate and, possibly, his fatal attraction for, possibly, a very beautiful woman. It flatters Neff’s vanity, of course, that the woman be exceptionally sexy, exceptionally beautiful. We see her as such, but the angle of the film is that we see her, and most everything else, through Neff’s eyes. Even the idea of fate, persistent on the soundtrack in Miklos Rozsa’s main theme, is debatable. Fate is everywhere insisted upon, by the music, throughout the dialogue. Too much, one might think. Its participation in the film’s tragic outcome may be Neff’s attempt at rationalization.
Neff’s dictation, at least at first, seems to be the truth, or at least part of the truth. His recorded remarks are directed toward Barton Keyes, the insurance firm’s chief claims investigator, and something of a surrogate father to Neff—Neff’s superego, or conscience, as it were. (There’s a lovely homophone in the dialogue. When the Dietrichson maid first shows Neff into the parlor, she warns him that the liquor cabinet is kept locked, to which Neff responds, “I always carry my own keys.”) With labored breath, Neff says the following into Keyes’s Dictaphone horn: “Office memorandum. Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager, Los Angeles, July 16, 1938. Dear Keyes: I suppose you’ll call this a confession when you hear it. Well, I don’t like the word ‘confession.’ I just want to set you right about something you couldn’t see because it was smack up against your nose. You think you’re such a hot potato as a claims manager; such a wolf on a phony claim. Maybe you are. But let’s take a look at that Dietrichson claim, ‘Accident and Double Indemnity.’ You were pretty good in there for a while, Keyes. You said it wasn’t an accident. Check. You said it wasn’t suicide. Check. You said it was murder. Check. You thought you had it cold, didn’t you? All wrapped up in tissue paper with pink ribbons around it. It was perfect—except it wasn’t, because you made one mistake. Just one little mistake. When it came to picking the killer, you picked the wrong guy. You want to know who killed Dietrichson? Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson—me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars—until a while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman.” Auspicious beginning, except for the fact that much of the balance of the dictation attempts to shift responsibility for the murder to Phyllis Dietrichson, whose double-crossing of Neff and of her stepdaughter’s boyfriend, not to mention the murder of her spouse, are all meant to justify Neff’s killing her.
It has long seemed to me that Double Indemnity is a mischievous black comedy satirizing the Hollywood production code’s requirement that both Walter and Phyllis meet their ends for the crimes of adultery and murder. On one level, perhaps. But the film’s greatness unfolds on another level, in Neff’s determination to assassinate the character of this horrible woman who didn’t really love him, or didn’t love him enough, and who ensnared poor, gullible him, as the Devil might. The fact that Neff might actually believe this—there’s really no way to tell—is no reason why we should.
Wilder riddles Neff’s account with ambiguity. First, there is the setting of Los Angeles, a place of “twisted hopes and crooked dreams.” It is here that the Pacific All-Risk Life Insurance Company is located. (The Dietrichsons live in the suburbs.) We learn that Neff had the idea of such a crime as he commits before he even met Phyllis Dietrichson! Was her husband somebody else’s client before becoming Neff’s? Much is made of the fact that Mr. Dietrichson is too busy to leave the oil fields where he works as site manager to re-sign for continued coverage on a lapsed insurance policy. Is it possible, then, that Neff met the Dietrichsons, at their home, earlier than he claims? Then there is Wilder’s filmmaking. At the end of a number of scenes Dietrichson is shown with a cold, evil look in her eyes after Neff, who therefore could not have seen it, has departed. Keyed to the flashbacks that correspond to Neff’s dictation, these are deliberate touches meant to establish Phyllis as a heartless double-crosser. They are Neff’s characterization of Phyllis at moments he did not truly see her. Thus does Wilder ingeniously expose the disingenuous and self-serving nature of Neff’s confession. (Neff’s “confession” is like a schoolboy’s mocking one: “I confess—she did it.”) Taking the cake in this regard are Phyllis’s preparations to kill Walter before his arrival on the night that he plans to kill her. Such material is inherently ambiguous; Wilder may be “filling in the narrative,” but the upshot is that Neff, who did not see Phyllis do any of this, seems extraordinarily unreliable. We must be wary; since Neff is narrating the film, our minds (and our eyes) are in his grip.
Something else oddly figures into the film’s elusive and illusory quality. In 1944, the film is set in 1938—that is, before the start of the Second World War, even in Europe. With the world currently embroiled in war, this tale of suburban mayhem and murder assumes a remoteness akin to fantasy; it unfolds in a world that audiences at the time might have had difficulty believing ever existed. With the killing war going on, Double Indemnity may strike us as make-believe to a greater degree than most Hollywood movies. It might strike us as Walter’s make-believe.
The change of the couple’s name in the novel, where it’s Nordlinger, to Dietrichson surely also brings to mind an actress whom Wilder would subsequently direct twice: Marlene Dietrich. Besides being a (great) actress, Dietrich projects, in certain films, a captivating image of the female that’s more fabulous than real, rendering the reality of the character she is playing elusive for those men who fall in love with the image. In some sense, she is a projection of both their desire for love and for delicious entrapment. In a subtle way, the play on Dietrich’s name (to which we must add that Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis, is a blonde in this film, like Dietrich) hints that what we see of Phyllis through Walter’s eyes is, on a certain level, his fantasy.
Indeed, from their (allegedly) first encounter, Neff keeps trying to find out more and more about Phyllis—except, to our alert eyes, his interest seems deceptive. We feel that he is less interested in finding out about Phyllis, which implies that he believes in her reality, than in making love with her, for which his sex-talk is foreplay. One object that he lights on in order to express his interest in her is that “honey of an anklet” she wears. It turns out that it contains her first name, which he learns by asking about the anklet. Surely this indirect method of learning Phyllis’s name suggests the degree to which Neff’s perception of Phyllis is removed from his acceptance of her reality; it suggests his attempt to entrap her in his particular view of women, who exist for him as potential conquests. The whole tone of this meeting fits Neff to a predatory disposition. He isn’t looking for love; he’s looking for sex—and that’s perfectly understandable, given his situation as a more or less confirmed bachelor, but it’s not a basis on which we should regard his perceptions of Phyllis as reliable. How can Walter perceive this woman’s reality if, in essence, he doesn’t believe in her reality, as a human being separate from himself, to begin with? For her part, Phyllis uncrosses her legs at Walter’s insistence on the topic of the anklet, and (depending on your point of view) either shyly or coyly attempts to hide it behind her other leg. The ambiguity of her motive here is on point; the Phyllis we see, in accordance with Neff’s “confession,” may not be what she seems in any direction (from bad to good, good to bad, or bad to worse), and Walter Neff is certainly ill-equipped to help navigate us through her ambiguity.
If Wilder seems to delight in undercutting Walter’s reliability, he also seems to delight in making Phyllis as rich a character as he possibly can. One can ultimately dismiss Neff as an oaf (after all, Fred MacMurray plays the part), but Phyllis is something else. She is icy at moments, steelily determined, but it’s also the case that her loneliness in an unfulfilling marriage to an older man is distressing and deeply moving. Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—this may be the greatest performance ever given by an American-born film actress—is as cold and calculating as Neff wants her to be, for the sake of his “confession,” but she is also, at other times, full of heartache. The fact that the genuine latter moments creep into the visuals that correspond to Neff’s dictation suggests the vulnerability of Phyllis’s that may help explain Neff’s still-rattled heart. At the end, Neff is a terribly hurt boy lashing out at somebody he has already shot to death. In an extreme form, what we have here is a lover’s spiteful reaction when a love affair, or a marriage for that matter, has gone south. Feeling betrayed, Neff dictates a tale of betrayal. The only thing about Phyllis that this tells us is how badly the boy feels about her.
In nineteenth-century American fiction, Herman Melville—taking a page out of the satirical writings of Benjamin Franklin—invented the “trickster narrator” whose unreliability throughout a narrative that he proffers Melville finds ingenious ways to undercut, so that, if we’re alert readers, we can see around it. The ambiguity of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, near the turn of the century, owes something to this slippery kind of narration. In twentieth-century American fiction, without doubt the finest descendant of this strategy is Nick Carraway’s warped narration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In each of these cases, the unreliability of the narration isn’t a game, an aesthetic trick, but, instead, a method, a style, deeply allied with the work’s thematic purpose. Similarly, Neff’s narration discloses the inconsolability of his own life that the inconsolability of Phyllis’s mirror-images. As he would again in The Apartment (1960), Wilder is taking up the loneliness of bachelordom—Neff is shown inhabiting his scarcely furnished apartment in the near-dark; only when Phyllis visits does he turn on a light—and the loneliness of a life that revolves mostly around the grind of work. In this environment, anything that’s personally engaging—a love affair; a murder plot; intrigue—is bound to be light-sensitive, capable in a flash of turning one’s sense of self inside-out. Neff’s aggressive sex-talk with Phyllis at (perhaps) their first meeting, alone, in the Dietrichson house, very nearly telegraphs Neff’s eventual turning on her. For him, flirtation is sport; and, when you think about it, so is the murder. He is, after all, hardly a committed lover, given the fact that the murder scheme he proposes to Phyllis ensures their separation for a spell. But the murder isn’t “sport” for Phyllis—a chance to prove what she can get away with. She is miserable and in agony, and that’s another reason why Walter’s assassination of her character, after he has killed her, strikes us at least as wanting gallantry. Wilder makes it exceedingly hard for us to side with Walter against Phyllis, no matter how hard Neff tries turning her into a femme fatale.
MacMurray is much better than usual in this film—although, as a friend once pointed out, whenever Walter addresses Phyllis as “Baby” it sounds as if MacMurray has never called a woman this in his life. (Notoriously, the knuckleheaded actor refused to take off his wedding ring to play Neff. No matter. The upshot is that we attribute to Neff an early failed marriage the ghost of which he won’t give up. Such is indeed the sort of fellow who would coldbloodedly turn on a woman while insisting that it was she who thus coldbloodedly turned on him.) MacMurray gave another rare good performance when Wilder directed him again, in The Apartment. Recall the married man that MacMurray plays there, who is having an affair with the elevator operator at the insurance firm where they both work? It’s Neff, had he lived, sixteen years later.
A key relationship in the film is the one between Neff and Keyes, brilliantly (and hilariously) played by Edward G. Robinson in his best film performance. Given Neff’s character assassination of Phyllis, one wonders if the hint of Keyes’s homosexual interest in Neff, floating elusively in and out of the two lonely men’s various exchanges, is a bit of projection on Neff’s part. Again, his account, which we “see” as he dictates, is not to be trusted on any point.
Apart from Chandler and Stanwyck, however, Wilder’s principal collaborator is his black-and-white cinematographer, John F. Seitz, whose talent he had employed earlier (Five Graves to Cairo, 1943) and would employ again (The Lost Weekend, 1945; Sunset Boulevard). Neff tells us, when he enters the Dietrichsons’ parlor, that the day’s light through venetian blinds has shown up dust. Seitz and Wilder conjure an image that fits Neff’s description. After Mr. Dietrichson’s murder, which involves whacking him on the head and laying his corpse down on railroad tracks (the set-up is to make it look as though Dietrichson fell off the observation deck of a train), Neff returns home, noting his sense that everything would go wrong with this “perfect crime” of his. His footsteps, he tells us, were the footsteps of a dead man. Wilder has had the sound of those footsteps erased (or, rather, technically, not added), but the coup that he and Seitz score is to make the voluminous darkness at the early hour correlative to this eerie silence. It’s the image of the night as a vast grave in which, an illusion of life, Neff anticipates his own decomposition into nonmateriality. During this walk, Neff is as light as dust.
This is a terrific film, and one with a truly phenomenal Ruby Stevens, a.k.a. Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck succeeds in suggesting all sorts of possibilities in Phyllis beyond the mold of a heartless bitch and fatal female that Neff is determined to straightjacket her into. The scene of Phyllis’s death, with Stanwyck luminous and rapturous in the dark, is tremendous; heartrending. We see the soul that Walter Neff could never see, and we wonder at his incapacity to believe in this woman’s reality.
Neither could the Nazis, it appears, believe in the reality of Jews, and Wilder himself was Jewish. This adds a thematic wrinkle to his first great film, one that is more relevant to 1944 than even Wilder may have known at the time that he made Double Indemnity. This may be the single most daunting moral problem facing us all: believing in the reality of others.
Tags: Barbara Stanwyck, Billy Wilder
