Double Indemnity Review

The film tells you in its first minutes that the scheme failed, with Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff wounded and dictating a confession into an office recorder, then spends the rest proving that knowing makes it worse. Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who could not stand each other, rebuilt James M. Cain's novella around Neff and his mentor, the claims man Barton Keyes, so the real love story is between two insurance men. Edward G. Robinson plays Keyes as a genius of suspicion with a little man in his stomach.

John F. Seitz lit the interiors through venetian blinds and blew aluminum dust into the air so every room looks stale. Barbara Stanwyck, who hesitated to play an out-and-out killer, gives Phyllis a patient calm more frightening than any snarl, even under the blonde wig Wilder later called the biggest mistake of his career. MacMurray, a light comedian Wilder pestered into the part, is perfect as a nice guy with rot underneath.

The dialogue is the glory, clipped and loaded with double meanings the Production Code could not quite catch, above all a flirtation about speed limits. Nothing is loose. It lost all seven of its Oscar nominations in the Going My Way sweep, and it set the standard noir has been measured against ever since.