#1: Double Indemnity

Release Date: July 6th, 1944

Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray

Written by: Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder

Directed by: Billy Wilder

4 Stars

The quintessential film noir. I haven’t seen much of the film noir cannon - maybe fewer than ten films - but this is the movie that springs to mind when I think of the genre. 

The cast is perfect. Fred MacMurray plays a lazy dope, but damn it, he’s tall and handsome and lives in sunny 1940s Los Angeles, and while 20-year-olds are fighting Nazis across the Atlantic, he’s happy to rent himself a little apartment and underachieve at work and drink whiskey every night. That is until he meets the femme fatale, falls in love, and with her hatches the perfect scheme to kill her husband and collect the life insurance.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Phyllis Dietrichson, and she deftly threads the needle in her portrayal of a psychopath who somehow remains sympathetic. She’s cunning, yet it’s MacMurray’s Walter Neff who ultimately drives the murderous plot. In marriage she’s just a pretty face, and in her affair with Neff, she’s not much more, frankly.  

She’s after money, clearly, but what is Neff actually after? Some hot sex with a smoking hot blonde in an LA mansion and to not work? It seems so. 

I’d love to have an alternate cut where Stanwyck’s character does the voiceover narration. I think she could talk me into believing both these men, her husband and her lover, had it coming to them.