This is the third in our member-written series: My Favorite Crime Movie.
Despite our fondness for (obsession with?) serial killers, conventional wisdom says one is much more likely to be killed by a spouse than by a total stranger. And statistics say husbands do away with wives more than vice versa. But don’t tell that to filmmakers. Much to the consternation of my husband, some of my favorite movies involve wives for whom a simple divorce is just not enough.
Number one on that list for me is Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. As if those heavyweights were not enough, it was directed by Billy Wilder, with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and based on a novella by James M. Cain.
Double Indemnity was inspired by a 1927 murder committed by a New York woman and her lover. Ruth Snyder convinced her husband to take out an insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, which would pay double for an accidental death. Then she talked her paramour into murdering her husband. James Cain was among the journalists attending the trial.
In the film, insurance man Walter Neff (MacMurray) rings the wrong doorbell and lives to regret it when Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) answers. Actually she doesn’t answer. The door opens and his first glimpse of the lady of the house is of her standing at the top of the stairs, wrapped in a towel.
No matter how cool Neff plays it — the word “baby” is sprinkled liberally throughout the script — Phyllis is in charge from the moment she walks down those stairs.
“There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.”
“How fast was I going, officer?”
“I’d say about 90.”
Who wouldn’t want to deliver lines like that? And when did a piece of jewelry (the famous anklet) ever arouse such passion? Walter Neff, for all his hipster, cigarette-smoking, hat-twirling swagger, is toast. And so are we.
Enter the boorish, inconvenient husband. Exit, the husband. It won’t really be a spoiler to say that the briefly-seen husband isn’t the third member of this noirish triangle. That honor goes to Edward G. Robinson as Mr. Keyes, a fast-talking, no-nonsense claims adjuster who almost married once but called it off after investigating his fiancé’s family and finding them disreputable. One of my fave Keyes lines — “Margie. She sounds like she drinks from the bottle.” Can any worse be said of a woman? Not to Mr. Keyes.
With his internal “little man” calling the shots, Keyes refuses to believe Dietrichson’s death was an accident.
But the plot of the film is almost the least of it. The snappy dialogue laced with innuendo. The camera angles. The 1940s southern California vibe. The cars. Even the crazy blonde wig Stanwyck wears. These two murderous lovers are spiraling toward disaster the minute they meet, and I love every bit of it.
—Rosemary Harris
Rosemary Harris is a former president of MWA-NY and of Sisters in Crime New England. She is the author of the Dirty Business mystery series featuring amateur sleuth Paula Holliday.