Just last week, I watched Notorious for the first time. It was just about perfect, really, except for one thing: in his darker films, Hitchcock tends to make his protagonists unsympathetic and his leading ladies unconvincingly good. Because of that, there seems something missing in his noirish films, in Notorious and Rear Window and a few others, that makes me dislike them just a little more than I should.
Well, Double Indemnity does just the opposite, and how I love it. It's sort of like Psycho, in that the leading man is oddly sympathetic and the leading lady always suspect. But there's a core of sadness in the lead pair in Double Indemnity, instead of the shiftiness that characterizes both…