Movies

Double Indemnity (1944), an early example of the film noir genre, is one of the greatest movies ever made and is always a pleasure to watch and write about.  Other films in this category include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), which called noir (black) not only because of the grim, gritty, hardboiled plots and settings in the urban jungle of mid-20th Century America, but also because of the liberal use of shadow, shading and contrast that set the entire mood of the movie.  In these movies, many of the scenes take place in the shadows or in darkened interiors, with plenty of Venetian blinds, of course, and characters that are generally cynical, corrupt, deceitful, double-crossing and paranoid.  Overall, the use of this type of cinematography and lighting creates a sinister, menacing, claustrophobic effect, and unlike the typical Hollywood films, these never had happy endings.  This replicates the tone and mood of the detective stories on which many of these films were based, written by the masters of the genre like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandlerwho actually co-wrote the screenplay for Double Indemnity.

Double Indemnity begins with a classic film noir scene in which Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) drives erratically at high speed through the dark streets on Los Angeles then staggers into his office at the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company.  He stumbles to his desk, turns on the desk lamp and lights a cigarette with his one good arm.  Slowly and with seemingly great effort, he begins speaking into an old-fashioned Dictaphone.  As the camera focuses closely up on him, surrounded only by darkness and shadows, he is sweating and looks disheveled, weak and exhausted as he explains how he came to be alone in this office at night, bleeding from a bullet wound.  He starts recording his confession to Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the claims managing of the company, saying that Keyes was correct about almost everything in the case of Mr. Dietrichson.  His death was not an accident and his wife Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) was involved in planning and carrying it out, but he got one major item wrong Walter had killed Dietrichson rather than the man that Keyes had fingered.  In one of the classic film noir lines, he tells Keyes that he did it for money and a woman, but got neither in the end.

Phyllis is sick of her husband and also having an affair with a younger man named Zachetti, although Walter does not find this out until he has already become too deeply involved with her and her sinister plot.  She wants to take out an accident insurance policy on him without telling him, and Walter realized at once that she wants to knock him off.  Initially, he refuses, but then a voiceover scene as he driving around Los Angeles, drinking a beer at a drive-in then bowling and finally standing by the Venetian blinds in his darkened apartment, smoking a cigarette, he cannot get her out of his mind.  Alone in the dark, Walter realizes that he is all twisted up inside about Phyllis, and he knows that she will be coming there soon.  Soon enough, she is at the door, literally dressed to kill, telling him that he left his hat in her house.  Walter turns on a floor lamp but it does not seem to brighten the room very much, and the camera focuses on them and she comes closer and tells Walter that she only wants him to be nice to her.  They hold each other and then kiss in the still-shadowy room, as the camera stays centered on then.  In another voiceover to Keyes, Walter explains that he felt like a man who had spent his life working in a casino, and after catching many cheaters finally starts thinking about how he can crook the house better than anyone else.

The murder also takes place at night, with Walter in the back seat of the car as Phyllis and Mr. Dietrichson sit in front, waiting for the train.  They strangle her husband and leave his body on the train tracks so they will be able to collect double indemnity on his life insurance policy.  Once again, the parked car, the station and the train itself are all very dark and sinister-looking as Walter limps to the train on crutches, pretending to be Dietrichson, whose body is actually still in the car.  There are more Venetian blinds on the windows of the observation car as Walter stands there in the darkness talking to a Mr. Jackson of Medford, Oregon, making sure to tell him that his name is Dietrichson.  After he asks if Jackson could go back to his compartment and get his cigars, he jumps off the train into the night.  She is waiting in the car as the train passes by, and they quickly dump Dietrichsons body and crutches on the tracks.  When she cannot get the car started, they both appear to be terrified for a second, knowing they would be caught, but then Walter finally gets the motor to turn over and, relived, they kiss in the darkened car.  As Walter tells Keyes in another voiceover, Phyllis was as cold as ice as she drove through the dark streets, taking him back to his apartment she had no nerves and did not shed a tear.  Of course, as Walter knew all along, Keyes does not believe this death was accidental, but he tries to pin it on the wrong man.

One of the greatest scenes in the film is the climax at the Dietrichson house at night, in which Phyllis and Walter finally have a major falling out.  In the darkened living room, she sits in a chair, smoking, while Walter stands by a window staring out into the night through the Venetian blinds.  He tells what Keyes said, that both people involved in this murder were on a trolley ride to the gas chamber, but now he was going to get off the trolley.  From somewhere in the night, the song Tangerine is playing on the radio, but Walter decides he no longer likes the music.  Keyes and the cops would be there soon, and he would make sure that she and Zachetti took the fall for the murder then walk away free and clear.  He is about to close the blinds and the curtains, but just as he is turning around, Phyllis shoots him.  She only hits him in the shoulder, though, and Walter walks up to her and says she should try again, but she cannot do it, though.  Walter holds her close, and with the venetian blinds casting a shadow on the wall behind them, says Goodbye, baby before he shoots her twice.  Outside in the darkness, Walter hides in the bushes when he sees Zachetti approaching the house. He hands Zachetti a nickel, telling him to call Lola Dietrichson, the stepdaughter of Phyllis, who is the only nice character in the film.  For some reason that Walter cannot comprehend, she also loves Zachetti, so he makes sure that he will not be there when Keyes and the police arrive and find Phyllis dead on the floor of the living room.

In the last scene of the film, it is dawn in the office of the Pacific All risk company, and the sun is coming up through the Venetian blinds.  Walter is still speaking into the Dictaphone, looking even more pale, sweaty and shaky, but then he slowly turns his head discovers that Keyes has been standing at the door listening to him and finally knows the whole truth.  This knowledge makes Keyes look even more sad and tired than usual, however, rather than triumphant.  Walter asks him how long he has been standing there and responds long enough.  Walter laughs and says that here was one case that Keyes never figured out, to which Keyes replies that You cant figure them all, Walter.  He then tells Keyes that he can go ahead and give him the speechlets have itbut Keyes does only reluctantly and regretfully, in one of the classic lines of the film noir genre Walter, youre all washed up.  He offers to call an ambulance, but Walter says that he does not want the doctors to patch him up only so he can walk into the gas chamber at San Quentin under his own power.  He asks Keyes to give him four hours so that he can cross the border into Mexico.  He staggers out into the shadowy corridor but collapses right by the glass doors of the office, too weak from shock and loss of blood even to reach the elevator, which seems like it has been moved a couple miles away.  We hear Keyes dialing the telephone, requesting an ambulance at the pacific All risk Insurance Company and informing them that yes, its a police case.  Walter is leaning up against the glass doors, and Keyes kneels next to him.  He puts a bloody cigarette in his mouth but is unable to light it, so Keyes strikes a match and does it for him.  Walter says that he could not figure out the case because the man who committed the crime was too close, sitting at the desk right across from him.  Closer than that, Walter, Keyes replies, to which Walter says I love you, too.

In mood, tone, use of lighting, shadow and close-ups on characters surrounded by darkness, Double Indemnity was one of the films that set the standard for the entire film noir genre.  These characters seem to spend most of their lives in darkness and shadows as they plot their murders and betrayals, and the use of Venetian blinds to cast shadows in darkened rooms actually become one of the clichs of these types of films because they were used so frequently in Double Indemnity.  Its scenes are full of all the familiar objects, furniture and paraphernalia of urban, industrial America circa 1940 dark train stations and sedans, all-night bars with neon signs, old-fashioned street lights, desk lamps and floor lamps, telephones with dials rather than push buttons, radios playing big band music, characters who chain smoke everywhere without any hint of self-consciousness.  Film noir also offered outstanding roles for women characters, playing very deadly and deceitful females in world where nothing is as it seems, no one can be trusted and people will do anything for money.