Ten Movies I'm Glad I Saw: Double Indemnity (#2)

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Monday, Monday. Remember last week was a holiday? Distant memories now! That's okay. It's time for another one of those movies from before I was born that I watched (in this case, in American Cinema class in college) and ended up loving. Here's today's film. #2: Double Indemnity The third consecutive film on my list narrated as a "backstory," and the second consecutive film noir movie. This one was -- and continues to be -- held as the standard for film noir. It's stunning. One of the things I liked about it was the "role reversal." I always knew (or knew of) Edward G. Robinson as a "bad guy," playing gangsters, thugs, and whatnot. In this movie, he's the good guy. And Fred MacMurray, the lovable dad on My Three Sons and sweet inventor in The Absent-Minded Professor? He's a devil. Ditto Miss Barbara Stanwyck (don't ask why, but she was always Miss Barbara Stanwyck in the opening credits of The Big Valley): the heroine of that TV series is the poster babe for femme fatale in this flick. That, of course, was part of the problem with this movie. The two lead characters -- an insurance claims salesman and a woman in an unhappy marriage who fall in lust at first sight -- were so unsavory that a lot of actors turned the roles down. (Maybe the original final scene, of Walter Neff sitting in Sing Sing's electric chair, didn't help [that scene was deemed too controversial, so instead we see a seriously wounded Neff in Keyes' arms as the police and ambulance come for Neff].) But that's also part of the lasting power of this movie. This is from an era when the bad guy never got away with it, and part of the joy of this film is watching Barton Keyes (Robinson) hone in on what's wrong with the "double indemnity" life insurance claim that a man's widow (Stanwyck) is trying to collect. Until I got rid of cable this was one of the films I watched every time it was on Turner Classic. Now I guess I have to get the DVD. It's a beautiful classic in crime drama. Trivia: Raymond Chandler, the famous mystery novelist, co-wrote the script. Double Indemnity Directed by Billy Wilder Released in 1944 Barton Keyes explaining his "little man" who detects phony claims: