Part of Noir-November

“I wonder if I know what you mean.” “I wonder if you wonder.”

The insurance business is an inherently slimy game. Doesn’t matter the type: life, health, automobile, disability. It’s all dirty. It can’t help but be. Everyone needs the product—everyone faces risks against which they must hedge—but the insurer only makes a buck by not paying out claims. All well and good if no claims come in, but people inevitably die or get sick, wreck their cars or have accidents. Claims are inevitably made. The insurer’s job ends up being not to provide the service it has just sold. It’s a bait and switch—a promise of assistance followed by a laundry list of reasons why that…

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…

If there ever were a fitting cinematic companion piece to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" would make a worthy candidate. Stark and spare, a tangible note a foreboding guilt hangs over Wilder's dark drama as it characters' schemes tangle and threaten to fall apart. Crackling with unwavering tension and conniving ambition, the classic noir is every bit as good as its reputation suggests; and that reputation suggests an excellent, pioneering, and fully engrossing work of film.

"Double Indemnity" is all about the art of the scheme. When an insurance man gets caught up in a plot to kill a man for his insurance policy, no one involved will ever be the same. Hushed-tone voice-overs, femme fatales, and…

Establishing the genre of film-noir in cinema, catapulting Billy Wilder into the big leagues of Hollywood filmmakers & expertly sustaining its foreboding ambience throughout its runtime, Double Indemnity is one of the brightest works of Wilder's career which, in spite of revealing its finale to the viewers in its opening moments, succeeds in carving out its own moments of suspense.

Based on James M. Cain's 1943 novella of the same name, Double Indemnity tells the story of an experienced insurance salesman who starts an affair with the seductive wife of one of his clients & devises a scheme to murder his client in a manner that invokes the double indemnity clause of his insurance plan. Trouble begins when his boss begins to…

If you like your dialogue to snap, mixed with a little bit of misogyny and some good old fashioned cynicism, then Billy Wilder is your man. With a firecracker of a script adapted from a novel of the same name, Double Indemnity burns off the screen as a trio of single minded characters all race to outwit each other.

Film noir doesn't come any slicker than hearing Walter Neff's recollection on the blonde dame that plagues his mind after he first claps eyes on her. Neff is a man that has it all figured before he walks into the Dietrichson residence looking to wrap up a simple sales renewal. He dresses slick and talks fast with an answer for everything,…

I think this is my third viewing of Double Indemnity, and each time I fall further in love with that dialogue. It's relentlessly perfect. I mean:

Walter Neff: 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?

Barton Keyes: 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.

Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour. 
Walter Neff: How fast…