Double Indemnity and the Film Noir

The term film noir was first coined by French reviewer Nino
Frank1 when the end of the wartime embargo brought five 1944
Hollywood films – The Woman in the Window, Laura, Phantom
Lady, Double Indemnity, and Murder, My Sweet – to Paris in the same
week in 1946. All five films seemed to take place in a world marked by
menace, violence, and crime and yet distinct from the world of the
gangster cycle of the 1930s. In christening the young genre, Frank was
thinking not so much of earlier movies as of earlier novels. The label
film noir was adapted from Marcel Duhamel’s Série noire translations
for Gallimard of British and American hard-boiled novels. The privateeye
stories of Dashiell Hammett and of Raymond Chandler, whose gorgeously
overwrought prose made him the most obvious stylistic patron
of noir, had broken the decorum of the formal detective story
from Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie. But an even closer analogue was
to be found in the breathless suspense novels of James M. Cain (The
Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934; Double Indemnity, 1936) and Cornell
Woolrich (The Bride Wore Black, 1940; Phantom Lady, 1942), which
trapped their heroes in a nightmarishly claustrophobic world of evil.
Except for their common breeding ground in anonymous, claustrophobic
cities that dramatized postwar alienation and disillusionment,
noir heroes could not have had less in common with their gangster
forebears. The principals of this new breed of crime films were not
promethean challengers, or even professional criminals, defying the
repressive institutions of their worlds, but hapless, sensitive, often
passive amateurs who typically were seduced into criminal conspiracies
through their infatuations with the sultry, treacherous heroines,
femmes fatales who had no counterpart in the man’s world of Hollywood
gangster films. Unlike gangster films, which traced the rigidly
symmetrical rise and fall of their outsized heroes, films noirs more often
showed their heroes fatalistically sinking into a pit after the briefest
of come-ons. The heroes of noir often dreamed of dabbling briefly
in crime before returning to their normal lives, or found themselves
trapped in the criminal plots of others despite their own innocence.
In either case, the way back to normalcy was barred; they were so
completely doomed by the slightest misstep, and their doom so openly
telegraphed to the audience from the opening scene, that the very
idea of heroism, even criminal heroism, became hopelessly distant.
Fueled from its first identification by the melding of its pop-cultural
roots with the postwar disillusionment that made philosophical existentialism
fashionable,2 film noir has continued to enjoy more prestige
than any other variety of crime film except for the gangster film, and
has been the subject of more intense and enduring critical scrutiny;
but it has also, for some of the same reasons, been the hardest sort
of crime film to define. Steve Neale is only the most recent commentator
to conclude that “as a single phenomenon, noir . . . never existed.”3
Even its duration has been the subject of considerable dispute, although
most critics have bracketed it by John Huston’s The Maltese
Falcon (1941) and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), and many more
have defined the decade after Nino Frank’s list of 1944 films, ending
with Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), as its heyday. As the quintet
of films that first inspired Frank’s label suggests, the label of noir
has often been invoked to constitute a tradition of films that seem to
have little in common with each other except for the crimes their characters
commit.

Even commentators who agree in linking the rise of noir to the end
of the war have offered dauntingly diverse theories of its origins. Michael
Renov roots noir’s misogynistic fear of treacherously powerful
women in the looming return of GI’s who would find that their jobs had
often been taken by the women they had left behind.4 Lucy Fischer
links the films’ concern with “psychoneurotic” victims of “male hysteria”
to the war’s legacy of shell shock.5 Frank Krutnik, turning from
psychoanalysis to economics, points out that the stylized visuals of
noir were dictated in part by a 1943 ceiling of $5,000 on set construction
per film imposed by the War Production Board, down from a prewar
average of $50,000 for A pictures and $17,500 for B pictures.6 Paul
Kerr, arguing more broadly that film noir resists what Colin MacCabe
calls “the homogenisation of different discourses by their relation to
[the] one dominant discourse” of realism, ends his essay with the
pointedly narrow premise that the stylized black-and-white visuals of
noir marked a site of resistance to “the absorption of a color aesthetic
within realism.”7

Politically minded theorists have found no more comfort in their
shared perspective. Both Carl Richardson and Thom Andersen link
the decline of film noir in the 1950s to the decline of the Hollywood
Left – Andersen has coined the term film gris to describe the films of
blacklisted Hollywood leftists like Jules Dassin (Thieves’ Highway,
1949) and Nicholas Ray (Knock on Any Door, 1949)8 – but adopt sharply
different definitions of and attitudes toward leftist filmmaking,
whose drive toward realism was a prerequisite for its political critique.
Mike Davis sees noir as using an “existentialized Marxism” to unmask
Los Angeles as the “bright guilty place” Orson Welles presents in The
Lady from Shanghai (1948), Dean MacCannell as driven by the tension
between democracy and a capitalism grown stiff and antidemocratic,
and Joan Copjec as arising more generally from “a split between power
and those whom power subjects such that the very world of these
subjects appears incomprehensible to them.”9

This conceptual Babel has deep roots. From its beginnings as a critical
term, film noir has overlapped with many other varieties of crime
film. Lady in the Lake (1947), like most screen adventures of Raymond
Chandler’s hard-boiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe, is a noir detective
story. Brute Force (1947) is a noir prison film. Body and Soul (1947) and
The Set-Up (1949) are noir boxing stories. They Live by Night and Gun
Crazy (both 1949) are noir tales of doomed lovers on the run. The Killing
(1956) is a noir caper. Possessed (1947) is a noir weepie. These labels
exploit one of the two main definitions of noir: a distinctive blackand-
white visual style that emphasizes what Janey Place and Lowell
Peterson have called “antitraditional” lighting, camera, and mise-enscène
and what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson
have called “specific and non-subversive conventions derived from
crime literature and from canons of realistic and generic motivation.”

The leading visual motifs of film noir, memorably summarized by
Paul Schrader’s dictum, following Frank’s 1946 essay, that “compositional
tension is preferred to physical action,”11 are such well-known
Hollywood visual conventions that many of them have become clichés
parodists have used to evoke a whole era. Since they do not share the
preference for balanced, harmonious visuals motivating the orthodox
Hollywood practice of high-key lighting, noirs move and dim (or dispense
with entirely) the fill light that normally complements the key
light, producing a low-key, high-contrast, highly directional style of
lighting and creating unbalanced visual compositions marked by dazzling,
bleached-out whites amid pools of deep shadow that often conceal
important onscreen spaces or expressions on characters’ faces.
Shooting nighttime exterior shots night-for-night produces rich, velvety
blacks that provide a dramatic contrast to the heroes’ garishly lit
little world. The wide-angle lenses often used to extend depth of field
exaggerate apparent depth within the image, so distorting the body
of Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in The Maltese Falcon and the
face of Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) in Touch of Evil that the characters
turn into gargoyles. At the same time, the coldly expressive miseen-
scène, a Hollywood refinement of the insistent expressionism of
German silent films from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des
Dr. Caligari, 1920) to M (1931), acts as a symbolic theater for hidden
desires the characters can neither articulate nor satisfy, while confirming
what Dana Polan has called “the radical externality and alterity
of environment to personality.”12 A preference for angled shots
disorients viewers and renders the world of the film more abstract,
making the characters appear more menacing in low-angle shots and
trapping them in their surroundings in high-angle shots. Sharply defined
shadows and rain-slick streets create reflections that double and
fracture the stable identities that would normally be incarnated in the
actors’ bodies. In extreme examples, characters’ bodies are kept on
one side of the screen, creating unbalanced masses that dramatize imbalances
of power and the characters’ alienation.

From its earliest formulations, the challenge of defining noir has
been to theorize a relation between its visual conventions and the narratives
of crime that have generated its leading alternative definition.
Defining noir purely as a visual style would exclude such noir classics
as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Key Largo (1948), as
well as the Technicolor noir romances Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and
Niagara (1953), and open the gates to hundreds of films that borrow
noir’s expressionistic visual style without its criminal plots, from the
science-fiction terrors of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to the
foiled middle-class adultery of Brief Encounter (1945) to the epic biog-
raphy of Citizen Kane (1941), whose pioneering use of deep focus and
expressionistic mise-en-scène has some claim to have inaugurated
the noir visual style.13

The films more often invoked as the genre’s precursors, however,
are Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and The Maltese Falcon – although,
apart from their emphasis on crime, these two detective stories
have little in common with each other. Certainly their visual styles
could not be more different. Stranger on the Third Floor is a low-keylighted
nightmare about a witness who is afraid that his testimony has
helped convict an innocent man of murder. The wide-angle interiors
of The Maltese Falcon, by contrast, are evenly lit and traditionally balanced.
Attempts to construct even the most rudimentary history of
noir are therefore stymied by the competing claims of the style of individual
shots and scenes and larger-scale narrative concerns.14
The troubled relations between style and narrative are focused in
the five 1944 films that inspired Nino Frank’s label in the first place.
The Woman in the Window – with its story of how a man’s fascination
with a painting of a beautiful woman displayed in a shop window leads
him first to an acquaintance with the woman herself, then suddenly
to murder when the two of them are interrupted by her enraged lover,
and finally to suicide when his frantic efforts to conceal the crime go
increasingly awry – marries a noir plot to a visual style more geometric
than moodily expressionistic. Laura, a handsomely designed, acidly
literate whodunit with a velvety look and a haunting theme song,
pits a middle-class cop who has also fallen in love with a portrait
against the amusingly monstrous gallery of aristocratic suspects to
the apparent murder of Laura Hunt; in both thematic and visual terms,
it has even more tenuous links to film noir. Phantom Lady, best remembered
for two remarkable sequences – the death of a murder suspect
under the wheels of a subway train and a jam session in which a potential
witness woos the heroine with an orgiastic drum solo, shot in
the most evocative low-key-lighted style – is for most of its running
time a much lighter suspense story about a secretary trying to free
her accused boss from an equally photogenic prison. Murder, My
Sweet [Fig. 28], though it makes the most consistent use of low-key visuals
from its striking opening, is a parboiled private-eye story whose
edge is softened by the casting of musical star Dick Powell as Philip
Marlowe and by its incongruously happy ending. Of all the five films
that inspired Frank, only Double Indemnity’s noir credentials have never
been questioned, and the film may rightly stand, in its marriage of
dark visuals and darker narrative to a pitch-black view of the world,
as the founding exemplar of the genre, the film whose rigorously metaphoric
structure reveals the logic that weds noir visuals to noir narrative.
The union of talents that produced Double Indemnity seems so inevitable
in retrospect that it is surprising to recall its director’s unlikely
background. Although Vienna-born Billy Wilder had been collaborating
on screenplays since Robert Siodmak’s German semidocumentary
People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), his best-known credentials
were as a writer of sophisticated Hollywood comedies like
Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). Neither of the previous films
Wilder had directed, the romantic comedy The Major and the Minor
(1942) nor the suspenseful war melodrama Five Graves to Cairo (1943),
could have prepared audiences for the unrelentingly bleak cynicism
of Double Indemnity. Ironically, this new cynicism, once revealed,
28. Murder, My Sweet: The visual style of film noir coupled with a parboiled
detective story. (Dick Powell, Ralf Harolde)
would become the predominant note of such varied Wilder films as
the alcoholic confessional The Lost Weekend (1945), the lurid Hollywood
exposé Sunset Blvd. (1950), the acid journalistic fable The Big
Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole, 1951), the POW comedy-drama Stalag 17
(1953), the courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the
Prohibition gangster comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the acrid office
romance The Apartment (1960), and the parodistic fantasy The Private
Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

Wilder’s regular collaborator, writer-producer Charles Brackett, declined
to join him in adapting such a suspect property as Double Indemnity,
which had been considered and rejected for filming even before
its first publication. Cain’s novella, based on the real-life 1927 Ruth
Snyder–Judd Gray murder case, told the story of insurance salesman
Walter Huff’s unholy partnership with femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger
(whose names were changed in the film) to kill her husband for the
insurance money. The tale was widely criticized as not only sordid but
socially subversive, offering, in the warning of the Hays Office, a blueprint
for the perfect murder, though one with fatal consequences for
both conspirators. Because Cain himself, under contract to Fox, was
unavailable to write the adaptation for Paramount, Wilder asked noir
godfather Raymond Chandler – who had never before worked on a
movie even though he was now living in Hollywood – to collaborate
with him. The results were a prickly working relationship but a definitive
scenario that punched up Cain’s dialogue, which Chandler found
effective on the page but surprisingly flat in the ear, with some of
Chandler’s most florid verbal inventions.

Wilder and Chandler’s coldly overwrought screenplay was perfectly
complemented by art directors Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira. Dreier,
like Wilder, was a veteran of German expressionist cinema who, in the
course of rising to head Paramount’s art department, had designed
the atmospheric visuals for such striking films as Underworld (1927),
Thunderbolt (1929), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Pereira, who
would follow Dreier in 1950 as Paramount’s supervising art director,
was a unit art director working on his first big-budget film en route to
later collaborations with Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. For Double Indemnity
they were joined by director of photography John F. Seitz,
who had pioneered low-key-lighting effects for director Rex Ingram as
early as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse (1921) and Scaramouche
(1923) before moving on to such Paramount properties as This Gun
for Hire (1942) and Five Graves to Cairo.

The film wastes no time in establishing its leading visual and thematic
motifs. A reckless midnight drive through the dark streets of
Los Angeles to an office building, where Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray)
slowly and painfully emerges from the car, ends with his elevator trip
to the twelfth-floor offices of the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company,
where the camera follows him to disclose a few scattered cleaning
women toiling among the rows of desks that line the vast floor below
the iron-railed mezzanine where he stands. The scene inescapably recalls
a prison yard, complete with prisoners working below a catwalk
framed by iron bars, with Walter posed as a warden15 – though Walter
himself repeatedly refuses the role of enforcer to embrace the role of
transgressing prisoner, as he makes clear in his opening words to a
Dictaphone at his desk: “Office memorandum. Walter Neff to Barton
Keyes, Claims Manager. Los Angeles, July 16th, 1938. Dear Keyes: I suppose
you’ll call this a confession when you hear it.” The ensuing confession,
which comprises most of the film, demonstrates that Walter,
who ought to be as vigilant as his boss Keyes (Edward G. Robinson)
in ferreting out bogus claims, has perpetrated one of his own by plotting
with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to kill her husband,
a Pacific All-Risk client, for the proceeds of an accident insurance policy
for which they have tricked him into applying.

Although Walter is immediately established as an authority figure
to whom the elderly elevator operator defers, and as a victim by virtue
of the wound in his shoulder that slows him down and immobilizes
his left hand, every detail of the mise-en-scène makes him a victim
imprisoned in his own office, a status confirmed by the flashback
structure that presents his story from the ironic viewpoint of someone
who already knows how every scene will turn out and who often
comments on the action from his informed point of view, as Walter
does after his first encounter with Phyllis: “It was a hot afternoon, and
I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How
could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”
His ironic commentary thus makes the Walter who appears onscreen
a prisoner of his own discourse. Although he undertakes each
of his actions as if it were freely chosen, he is trapped in the narrative
shaped by his voice, which selects and dramatizes incidents precisely
to the extent that they substantiate his confession to murder gone
wrong. The extended flashback, preferably accompanied by the ironically
informed voice-over echoed in different keys in Laura and Murder,
My Sweet, became the defining narrative convention of film noir,
structuring such varied examples of the genre as Leave Her to Heaven,
Mildred Pierce (1945), The Killers (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and The
Big Clock (1948) before reaching its apotheosis in the flashback narrated
by a corpse in Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. – an ironic trope that survives,
often in even more ironic guises, in such recent films as Traces
of Red (1992), Casino (1995), and American Beauty (1999).16
Walter’s entrapment in his own narrative is telegraphed at every
point by the film’s visuals. No sooner has he arrived at the Dietrichson
house in an attempt to get Dietrichson to renew his auto insurance
policy than he is confronted by Phyllis Dietrichson, alluringly toplit
with a white towel wrapped around her as she stands behind the
wrought-iron railing at the top of a staircase. Walter’s voice-over communicates
his immediate reaction: “I wanted to see her again, close,
without that silly staircase between us.” He soon gets his wish to
break through the iron barrier when Phyllis, freshly dressed, trips
down the stairs to join him; but his pleasure that Phyllis has broken
through the boundary between them turns into a realization that he
has actually broken into a prison whose walls Walter first glimpses
when Phyllis asks how she can buy her husband an accident insurance
policy without his knowing it [Fig. 29].17 Throughout the rest of
the movie, the mise-en-scène will serve as a prison for the unwary,
foreshadowing the striking exterior landscapes in such later noirs as
Night and the City (1950), in which nocturnal London becomes a mirror
of Harry Fabian’s feverishly shifting moods, and On Dangerous Ground
(1952), which balances the claustrophobic city against the natural settings
to which the police hero pursues the suspect. Even after the stylized
cityscapes of Double Indemnity shift to the more naturalistic, indeed
documentary, urban exteriors in such later noirs as Kiss of Death
(1947), The Naked City (1948), and D.O.A. (1950), they still work to trap
the heroes in an urban jungle.

Wilder had originally planned to end the film with a sequence showing
Walter’s execution in the San Quentin gas chamber but scrapped
it after shooting because he became convinced it would be too intense
for audiences. Remarkably, however, the film manages to displace any
number of San Quentin’s visual hallmarks – the iron bars, the ubiquitous
railings, the guards hemming the prisoner in, the numberless
frames within the movie frame – onto more ostensibly neutral settings,
so that nearly every scene carries portentous reminders of Walter’s
unspoken fate, a fate that becomes all the more ironically entrapping
because it is so obvious to the audience. Excising Walter’s execution
from the film also underlines one of its most cynical jokes: the absence
from the film of any police officers, emphasizing Cain’s belief in
both Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice that the
officers sworn to uphold the law have much less interest in its enforcement
than the insurance companies who stand to lose financially from
any fraud.

Walter’s office, with its prison yard, its railed catwalk, and the darkpainted
wainscot and chair rail that segment the walls, offers the most
obvious example of prison decor; but the dim Dietrichson living room
is equally imprisoning, with its prominent striped shadows of venetian
blinds on the floor, in an obvious echo of prison bars that resonates
through the 1940s, and its clutter of furniture. Phyllis will trap
Walter on the sofa in their second meeting, leaning forward confidentially
to ask whether there isn’t some way she could buy her husband
an insurance policy without bothering him. Later, Walter and Phyllis
will sit surrounding Dietrichson (Tom Powers), her leg cocked at him
like a rifle, as he unwittingly signs the policy. Walter’s own apartment,
29. Double Indemnity: The femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) and her victim
(Fred MacMurray).
when Phyllis arrives there to seduce him into helping her, is shrouded
in nearly complete darkness. Even Jerry’s Market, the innocuous grocery
store where Phyllis and Walter meet twice, first to plan the details
of the murder and then to quarrel about submitting the insurance
claim, is designed with a threatening geometry that recalls Fritz Lang’s
most menacing storefronts in M. In some shots the camera watches a
stone-faced Walter and a sunglassed Phyllis pointedly not looking at
each other, isolated by their togetherness, as stacks of canned goods
loom ominously behind them; in others, Wilder uses a high camera
angle over the tops of the aisles of foodstuffs that hem in the conspirators,
as he did in the early shot of the prison yard that is Pacific All-
Risk, to pin them to the spot with a God’s-eye view that sees them
exactly as they are despite their best efforts to hide.
Even when characters are not obviously menaced by the mise-enscène,
they eagerly surrender to the tyranny of the many symbolic objects
on which their murder plot depends. A close-up of the index card
Walter sticks under the clapper of his telephone bell illustrates how
completely his alibi for the evening depends on such apparently trivial
objects as the doorbell, the telephone bell, his rate book, and the
car he leaves in the garage to be washed. Just after Phyllis and Walter
have dumped Dietrichson’s body – his neck having been broken by
Walter, who had hidden in the back seat of Dietrichson’s car and then
masqueraded as him on the train to San Francisco – Phyllis is unable
to restart the car. A tight close-up of her alarmed, dead-white face, before
Walter warily reaches across and gets the engine to turn over, is
a sudden reminder of the killers’ helpless dependence on the car’s reliable
operation. The recipe for the perfect murder that exercised the
Hays Office depends so completely on the flawless operation of mechanical
devices that it makes the murderers automata themselves,
simultaneously dehumanizing them and emphasizing their fetishistic
attachment to other objects that speak the desires their dialogue cannot
express.

Just as the definitive noir narrative device is the extended flashback
and its definitive scenic icon the shadows of venetian blinds, the ultimate
noir fetish is the revolver, echoing Chandler’s own self-mocking
dictum for narrative structure (“When in doubt have a man come
through a door with a gun in his hand”18). In one of film noir’s most
notable legacies from the gangster film, handguns are used so inveterately
to establish and alter the balance of power in noirs from Murder,
My Sweet to Touch of Evil – reaching a climax in the aptly titled Gun
Crazy and in The Big Heat (1953), in which the revolver framed in isolation
just after the credits fires the shot that sets the whole story in
motion – that the fetish can be inverted or satirized in The Maltese
Falcon and The Big Sleep (1946), whose private-eye heroes regularly
ignore or disarm villains who depend on their artillery, and Kiss Me
Deadly, whose sociopathic private eye is forced to find new ways to
hurt the suspects he interrogates after the police confiscate his gun.
The revolver puts in only a cameo appearance in Double Indemnity,
but just as the film displaces the trappings of San Quentin onto other
settings that become equally threatening, it offers many substitute fetishes
for the handgun: the engraved anklet, shown in seductive closeup
as Phyllis descends the barred stairs, that first attracts Walter to
her [Fig. 30]; the Dictaphone into which Walter pours his solitary confession;
the matches he repeatedly uses to light Keyes’s cigars when
Keyes unfailingly cannot find matches of his own. The anklet stands
in for Phyllis’s nearly nude body, which Walter had glimpsed moments
before at the top of the stairs. The Dictaphone takes the place of the
absent Keyes, allowing Walter to reveal himself with an intimacy he
could never achieve face to face with his trusting boss. The matches
30. Double Indemnity:Walter (Fred MacMurray) admires the fetishistic anklet
worn by Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck).

do double duty: They reflect both the imbalance of power between
scheming Walter and his gulled, albeit suspicious, boss – an imbalance
powerfully redressed in the most tender scene in this chilly film, the
final moment when the wounded Walter, collapsed in the Pacific All-
Risk doorway, is unable to light his cigarette, and Keyes bends to light
it for him – and the affection the two men could never express to each
other without violating Hollywood taboos against male homoeroticism,
and for that matter against men’s ability to speak their love.19
Although similar uses of cigarettes to establish emotional intimacy are
too numerous to cite, Out of the Past offers a virtual catalog of such
images, from the good-girl heroine who carries matches even though
she does not smoke to the startling echo of Double Indemnity’s final
scene, when the jittery hero takes a lighted cigarette from the mouth
of a cabbie friend, draws on it, then offers it back.
Trapped equally by the Los Angeles territory through which he
must move to sell or be sold and by the objects on which his murder
plot and his sense of himself depend, Walter often pauses to illustrate
the ways he and other characters are trapped by frames within the
frames. The first objects Walter picks up in the Dietrichson home are
a pair of framed portraits of Dietrichson and his daughter Lola (Jean
Heather), who will soon become the direct and indirect victims of his
plot. When Walter later takes Lola to meet her boyfriend Nino Zachette
(Byron Barr), first Zachette, then Lola, is framed within his car window.
The most memorable of these framings, however, comes earlier,
when Walter watches Phyllis apply lipstick after dressing to meet him
in their first scene together, and the mirror in which she is watching
herself reflects the two of them as they really are: Walter unguardedly
giving Phyllis the once-over, Phyllis apparently ignoring him and looking
only at herself.

Such mirroring effects, unmasking the characters’ true natures, trap
them by confronting them with their own doubles, revealing fissures
within themselves they can neither overcome nor fully acknowledge.
In fact, it is the motif of doubling rather than darkness that is the keynote
not only of Double Indemnity but of film noir as a genre, the theme
that links noir’s crime narratives with its visual hallmarks.20 The pattern
begins in Double Indemnity with matched pairs of characters
who dramatize alternative responses to similar pressures. Hence Lola
Dietrichson, first shown competing with Phyllis in a game of Chinese
checkers neither of them wants to play, is the good girl to Phyllis’s
femme fatale, and Keyes, who consistently dresses in black and white,
is the straight-shooting insurance man consistently set against his
failed protégé Walter’s rogue salesman, who always dresses in noncommittal
gray suits, except when he is impersonating the man he is
planning to kill. But these external doubles are only a sign of a deeper
psychological doubling that is revealed by Walter’s incautious gaze
over Phyllis’s shoulder while she tellingly remarks, “I hope I’ve got my
face on straight” (indicating that her face is simply a mask assumed
for the occasion), and he replies, “It’s perfect for my money” (indicating
that he is only too eager to accept the mask at face value without
looking deeper). This sort of doubling is represented in different terms
when Phyllis, coming to visit Walter’s apartment after the murder,
hears Keyes inside and hides behind the apartment door as Keyes
comes out into the corridor, trapping Walter between the two people
who are contending for his soul. As Walter poses before the blank
door with Phyllis and Keyes on either side of him, the film asks which
Walter will prevail: Phyllis’s conspirator or Keyes’s employee? It answers
this question when he shields Phyllis from Keyes, waving her
in back of the door with a telltale hand [Fig. 31].

31. Double Indemnity: The hero (Fred MacMurray) trapped by his knowledge
of his guilty double (Barbara Stanwyck).
The motif of doubling each character with an alter ego that is revealed
to the audience but kept secret from the other characters is illustrated
by the film’s constant framings of characters with shadows
that reveal their hidden desires. Every time Walter enters the Dietrichson
home, he is preceded by his shadow, which lingers a moment
after each time he leaves. Much later, as Phyllis sets the stage for her
shooting of Walter, she is doubled with a shadow on the wall behind
her that shows her split nature. Even the costuming develops this motif
by revealing a side of Phyllis her words and actions do not. Unlike
Walter and Keyes, whose dress changes little in the course of the film,
Phyllis follows the unwritten dictate for Hollywood heroines of changing
her clothes for every scene. She is first shown wrapped in a white
towel, then changes into a dress that, following Cain, is described as
“pale blue” in the screenplay21 and photographs off-white. In their second
scene together, she wears a white blouse figured with large black
flowers and black slacks; later that night, at Walter’s apartment, she
has changed to a clinging white sweater and black slacks; and at the
supermarket the next time they meet she is wearing a gray coat that
she also wears for the murder. The next time she appears, summoned
to the insurance office by Keyes’s ineptly blustering boss Edward S.
Norton (Richard Gaines), she is in mourning for the husband she
helped kill, complete with a black coat, hat, and veil. Having begun as
an angelic vision beneath ethereal toplighting, Phyllis grows gradually
darker and darker as she pulls Walter into her murder plot. At this
point, however, the pattern reverses itself, and her remaining scenes
show her in successively lighter costumes until the scene in which she
shoots Walter while wearing off-white lounging pajamas. Far from revealing
her true nature, then, Phyllis’s outfits, like her makeup, merely
project the identity she has chosen for a particular effect, and the
effect she wishes to create in these later scenes is that she has disentangled
herself from her husband’s murder, leaving Walter holding
the bag.22

Phyllis’s carefully cultivated alter ego, which reveals the split between
her public personality and her unspeakable private desires, is
not the film’s foremost doubling. Indeed, Double Indemnity presents so
many doubles, beginning with its title, that it rivals the much betterknown
pattern of persistent doubles in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of
a Doubt (1943) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Like Hitchcock’s films,
Wilder’s frequently develops its action through pairs of scenes. Walter
visits the Dietrichsons’ house twice, hoping to get Dietrichson to re-
new his auto insurance; Phyllis balances the pattern by visiting Walter’s
apartment twice. There are two scenes in Jerry’s Market, two
with Nino Zachette, and two with Mr. Jackson (Porter Hall), the interloping
witness who speaks with Walter on the train. In the final showdown
between Walter and Phyllis – a scene in which Walter reminds
himself and her of the first time they met in the same room – two
shots are fired, one by (and into) each of the conspirators. In each
case the effect of these doubles is the same: The first term sets up a
tension whose source the second reveals, whether that source is Walter’s
lust for Phyllis or his determination to kill the lover who cannot
quite bring herself to fire the second shot that would kill him.
The dialogue, like that of Shadow of a Doubt, is liberally salted with
clues to the characters’, and the film’s, irreducible duality. Dietrichson
puts his signature to the fatal insurance application in response to
Walter’s direction: “Both copies, please.” “Sign twice, huh?” says Dietrichson,
dutifully inking his death warrant. Later, as Phyllis, driving
her husband to the spot where he is to be killed, asks him to be careful
on his broken leg lest he end up with one leg shorter than the other,
Dietrichson sulkily responds, “So what? I could break the other one
and match ’em up again.” Both cues point directly to the crucial doubling,
like the pairing of Charlie and her uncle in Shadow of a Doubt,
around which all the others are arranged: Walter’s impersonation of
Dietrichson on the train in order to suggest that he has died in an accidental
fall from the observation car’s rear platform, thus qualifying
the death for the double-indemnity payout stipulated by the accident
insurance policy.

Walter’s murder plan, which depends on his taking the place of the
man he has just killed, succeeds at a deeper level than he realizes.
When Dietrichson breaks his leg just a few days before he is scheduled
to take the train to his Stanford reunion, Walter insists that the
murder wait, because “it’s all worked out for a train.” Phyllis, though,
encourages her husband to take the train anyway, convincing Walter
that “with the crutches it’s much better” because most potential witnesses,
noticing the crutches rather than the man himself, will give a
wide berth to a man with his leg in a cast. Walter’s plan, that is, does
not so much involve substituting himself for Dietrichson as it does reducing
Dietrichson metonymically to his crutches and then substituting
Walter-on-crutches for Dietrichson-on-crutches. But the scheme
backfires in two ways. First, Dietrichson’s failure to submit a claim for
his broken leg alerts Keyes to the possibility that Dietrichson never
knew he was carrying the policy – a possibility that must, sooner or
later, lead him to Walter. Second, Walter’s masquerade succeeds all
too well in its aim of displacing Walter’s own identity onto a pair of
crutches. As Walter walks home from the successful murder, he becomes
irrationally convinced that “everything would go wrong. It
sounds crazy, Keyes, but it’s true, so help me: I couldn’t hear my own
footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.” It is not until much later that
Walter will realize that his impersonation of the crippled Dietrichson
is only a preparation for Phyllis’s treating the two of them identically,
since she plans to seduce Zachette into killing Walter just as she seduced
Walter into killing Dietrichson. Walter’s successful murder has
thus made him at the same time a victim of his accomplice, as the
film’s opening image so powerfully illustrates: As the credits roll, the
silhouette of a man on crutches comes forward from deep space to
approach the camera, eventually filling the screen. Is the man Dietrichson
or Walter? In the harsh backlight that effaces every trace of individual
personality, there is no way of knowing, just as there is no way
of telling the difference between the killer adopting the crutches his
lover has offered him and the victim whose fate predicts his own.
The criminal-victim Walter incarnates so economically is the central
figure of film noir, even more central than the femme fatale who so
often tempts him to his doom. In its most straightforward form, this
figure is beguiled into crime by a seductive heroine whose guilt is so
patent that it may seem to swallow his own, a villainous heroine like
Kitty March (Joan Bennett) in Scarlet Street (1945), Kitty Collins (Ava
Gardner) in The Killers, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) in Out of the Past,
Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) in The Lady from Shanghai, or Annie
Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy. But there are many other
ways to establish a criminal’s victimhood that do not depend on the
machinations of a femme fatale. In High Sierra (1941), hard-luck excon
Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is an honorable crook trapped in a
world he cannot escape. In A Double Life (1947), Anthony John (Ronald
Colman) is such an obsessive actor that he cannot stop playing
Othello. The professional skills the boxer heroes display in Body and
Soul and The Set-Up still leave them the helpless prey of deeper-dyed
criminals outside the ring. Kiss of Death casts the ex-con struggling to
go straight (Victor Mature) as the suffering Christ, a victim of luck and
circumstance who is redeemed by his heroism and the love of a good
woman. In the more typical In a Lonely Place (1950), the hero (Bogart
again) is sacrificed to the violent rages he cannot resist, even though
he is vindicated of the murder of which he is accused (and of which,
in the film’s source novel, he is guilty). The hero (Tyrone Power) of
Nightmare Alley (1947) rises, like his gangster forebears, from obscurity
to wealth and success, only to fall precipitously to the status of a
“geek,” the freak-show attraction he had first defined himself against.
Night and the City engages its hero (Richard Widmark) in a complex
series of treacherous relationships that unmask successively darker
depths of his ambition, until finally the last veil is torn away to reveal
his surprising and touching nobility. The roles of criminal and victim
combine still more problematically with the role of avenging detective
in the troubled-cop heroes of On Dangerous Ground, The File on Thelma
Jordan (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and Detective Story
(1951).

Despite its reliance on a femme fatale, Double Indemnity invokes
several of these patterns. Walter presumably sees himself as sacrificed
to Phyllis’s sinister plot, which reduces men to anonymous cripples,
and a generation of critics have followed him in emphasizing the powerfully
disruptive agency of the femme fatale in noirs from Murder, My
Sweet to Kiss Me Deadly. Almost equally often, however, the heroes’
involvement in crime stems from their infatuation with heroines who
are technically innocent of any crime, like Alice Reed (Joan Bennett)
in The Woman in the Window and Pauline York (Rita Johnson) in The
Big Clock. The prisoners in Brute Force are all doing time because of
the women in their lives, even though those women appear only in
flashback. Even heroines who are technically innocent, like Laura Hunt
(Gene Tierney) in Laura and Mary McLeod (Eleanor Parker) in Detective
Story, suffer intensive investigations into their alleged wrongdoings
and continue after their vindication under a lingering cloud of
guilt because of their sexuality, which makes every female, even the
dutiful helpmeets of Body and Soul, Kiss of Death, and The Set-Up, nonmale
outsiders in a world of male power and desire.
Dividing noir heroines into those who are stigmatized as evil and
those who are idealized into impotence does not absolve the male
heroes of guilt, as Double Indemnity shows, but simply externalizes it.
After all, noir heroes like Walter do not, as they would no doubt prefer
to believe, lose their identities to strong women; rather, they fall victim
to a radical split within themselves that would ensure their selfalienation
even without the catalyst of the femme fatale they blame
for their troubles. Walter’s law-abiding double Keyes shows this split
at its most benign in the scene in which he is introduced, when he
describes the “little man” inside him who “ties knots in my stomach”
every time a fraudulent claim crosses his desk. Walter clearly has a
healthy respect for the moral compass that keeps Keyes on course,
even though Keyes’s little man is never shown giving the boss anything
but pain. Keyes’s Manichaean, black-and-white view of the world
is clearly dictated by his uncompromising conscience. At the same
time, his comical thralldom to this tyrannical force hints that the price
of socialization may be pathological self-alienation.
Walter laughs at Keyes’s little man, but he has a diminutive tyrant
of his own: Phyllis, who dictates his every action just as assuredly,
often without lifting a finger. When Phyllis reschedules her second appointment
with Walter to a less convenient time, he muses in voiceover:
“I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including
a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about
some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson
and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg.” As he speaks, the
scene dissolves from a midshot of Walter in his office to a close-up of
Phyllis’s legs as she runs down the stairs to greet Walter, lounging with
a witless grin outside her front door. So powerful and immediate is her
hold over him from the beginning that the film does not even need to
show him changing his mind; his reaction is as unconscious and involuntary
as Keyes’s.

The central doubling in Double Indemnity, then, is of Walter Neff
with himself, the man whose motives he cannot explain and whose
actions he cannot accept. By doubling Walter with each of the other
main characters – Keyes as the good angel who cannot save him for
a socially productive life, Phyllis as the bad angel who seems to bear
the primary responsibility for his crimes, Dietrichson as the foretaste
of the future he blindly embraces – the film might seem to empty Walter
of the very possibility of agency. Yet the opposite is the case: As
is revealed by the split between the active, foolhardy Walter who is
shown within the flashback and the contemplative, powerless Walter
who narrates the story in intermittent voice-over, the film focuses
so obsessively on the problem of Walter’s agency that all the other
characters – from Phyllis and Keyes down to Lola, Zachette, and the
elevator operator – become projections of his fear and desire, modeling
attitudes and admonitions among which he feels powerless to
choose.

This problem is not an invention of film noir. Its most trenchant expositor
is Saint Paul: “That good that I would, I do not; but the evil
which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). It is at the heart of Poe’s
short stories, and it emerges with startling immediacy in Stevenson’s
story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886) and Freud’s
theory of the unconscious before flowering visually in the Weimar cinema
in which Wilder and art director Hans Dreier first worked. Indeed,
the major strain in German expressionist cinema from The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari to M is the displacement of psychological conflicts that
would be hopelessly deadlocked onto external conflicts that offer
some hope of resolution. This keynote of self-alienation distinguishes
Double Indemnity and the noir tradition it inaugurates from Hollywood
genres like the western and the musical, which are also constructed
around the external doubling of good guys and bad guys or quarreling
lovers, brought together respectively by ritual gunfights or dance
numbers. The difference is that in westerns and musicals, the heroes’
doubles remedy the heroes’ incompleteness, either by giving them
an outlet for their contradictory desires (as John Wayne’s characters
fight villains in order to domesticate a western landscape in which
he himself is too wild to live comfortably) or by providing them with
mates who complement their natures even as they fulfill their desires
(as a character played by peerlessly graceful Fred Astaire finds its perfect
partner once again in mates played by the more openly sexual
Ginger Rogers). In film noir, external doublings and couplings do not
complete the heroes but merely entrap them more deeply by emphasizing
their self-alienation. Hence Phyllis observes to Walter that the
very conspiracy that has brought them together forces them apart:
“It’s so tough for you. It’s like a war between us.” Keyes, as usual, is
more pungent in theorizing two conspirators:
Sometime, somewhere, they’ve got to meet. Their emotions are all kicked
up. Whether it’s love or hate doesn’t matter. They can’t keep away from
each other. They think it’s twice as safe because there are two of them. But
it’s not twice as safe. It’s ten times twice as dangerous.
In the view of the unmarried Keyes, the social life figured by romance
is one more trap; the wise man would shun all others and retreat into
himself with only his little man for company. Yet Keyes’s helpless servitude
to this little man, who brings him to Walter’s begging for some
peppermint or a bicarbonate, shows that even a solitary existence
would still be too crowded for comfort: There is no refuge from the
tyrannical superego, the Lacanian Law of the Father, that demands unquestioning
obedience without conferring any secure sense of the self
the world of film noir so mercilessly splits.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org