Double Indemnity (1944)

Being a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching re-runs of My Three Sons with Fred MacMurray and The Big Valley starring Barbara Stanwyck. Little did I know then that those two actors were in one of the quintessential film noir movies of the 1940's... Double Indemnity.

Double Indemnity, based on the novel by James Cain and written for the screen and directed by Billy Wilder, follows the standard film noir structure... a cold, calculating beauty manipulates an unsuspecting, lonely man to kill on her behalf, only to betray him at the end. This formula has been used numerous times since, including Body Heat with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner and The Last Seduction with Linda Fiorentino and Peter Berg.

In Double Indemnity, MacMurray plays 30's bachelor and insurance salesman Walter Neff and Stanwyck portrays the platinum blonde beauty Phyllis Dietrichson, who wants to take out an accidental death policy on her husband without his knowledge. She eventually convinces Neff to follow along as they slowly fall in love, to the point where Neff takes it one step further and devises a plan to execute the policy in a way that doubles the value of the payout... i.e. double indemnity.

Edward G. Robinson plays Neff's friend and insurance investigator, Barton Keyes. The more Keyes checks into the policy, the more the fingers point back toward Neff. The story does an excellent job of weaving the plot in one direction, then another. Once you think Neff has had it or Dietrichson will be found out, the story brings up another fact that twists it all around.

Double Indemnity is one of THE film noir classics and is one of the best examples of a genre that is all but lost on us today.