No Visible Scars: ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944)

By the early 1940s, Billy Wilder had written several films with Charles Brackett, and he would write several more, but for Double Indemnity — a tale of murderous infidelity — Wilder would have to find a different partner to help him adapt material so unseemly and incendiary.

Originally a novella-length story by James M. Cain published in installments in Liberty magazine, the property had been knocking around Hollywood for some years, but Charles Brackett wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to touch it. The studios had been warned away from doing so by the Hays Office, but Billy Wilder, in the understated words of Brackett, was “not easily frightened,” and, if anything, Double Indemnity’s risque reputation was an inducement to proceed, a bracing challenge.

Proceeding without Brackett would not be a problem, as Wilder had found in Raymond Chandler the perfect collaborator for such a story. It was the producer Joseph Stern who’d recommended Wilder check out the stories and novels of the then-little-known Chandler. “You could see the man had a wonderful eye,” Wilder remembered, invoking his phrasemaking ability by noting two lines redolent of those Chandler would soon be famous for: “Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool,” and “Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.” Wilder would reaffirm his admiration for the ripeness of Chandler’s prose by allowing many such lines into Double Indemnity.

In a sly cameo, Chandler whiles away his time outside Barton Keyes’ office, presumably with some stout American prose.

Chandler had never written for the movies before, and made this immediately obvious by handing in a slipshod script in a week or two. Wilder patiently explained to him that the movie-writing process happened in a much slower and more collaborative way, and for much more money than Chandler was proposing (When he gave him the figure, Wilder remembered, “[h]e almost fainted.”). So for several months the two occupied an office together and made the script emerge.

It was not a friendly partnership, and Wilder biographer Ed Sikov makes an excellent point when he says that “To their great credit, neither felt the need to get the job over with as quickly as possible and go their separate ways.” What they did instead was suffer over the pages and each other for as long as it took, in spite of their mutual antipathy. Wilder, for his part, attributes the problem to Chandler’s jealousy over Wilder’s ability to booze and womanize at whim (Chandler was a recovering alcoholic). Also, it was their little habits that got on each other’s nerves: Wilder’s insistence on wearing his hat indoors, Chandler’s insistence on leaving the window closed. Chandler would later claim that “working with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.”

Chandler certainly related to Walter’s need to stop off at a drive-in for a drink, and he had the language for it, too: ‘I stopped at a drive-in for a bottle of beer and one I had wanted all along, only I wanted it worse now to get rid of the sour taste of her iced tea and everything that went with it.’

But for the results it achieved, it was a wonderful collaboration. Wilder genuinely respected Chandler’s talent, and conceded to him on several matters. Perhaps most significant among these is Chandler’s insistence that Cain’s dialogue be rewritten, that it be altered in the image of Chandler’s own language. Wilder was skeptical at first, but after they conducted some readings with the actors, he quickly saw that Chandler was right.

So there were definite moments of amicability, and the two shared a sense of purpose about the direction the script should be heading. In that sense, you might even go so far as to call what they had an ideal partnership — even if it would be a stretch to compare their partnership to that of Walter Neff and Bernard Keyes.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray; standing) shares a flame with his friend and boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson).

But what is the nature of the Neff-Keyes relationship, exactly. Many have had their say. Certainly the queer-theorists have. (They light matches for each other’s cigars and cigarettes. They literally share a flame. It’s obvious!) But among those explanations that make some sense, I tend to go with the one that Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is simply too jaded for women or marriage (he’s tried them before), and Walter, though not indifferent to matters sexual, certainly doesn’t seem consumed by them — at least until Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) comes into his life.

But you can’t blame viewers for querying the queerness of this relationship — for relentlessly interrogating why these two men are so close. I think the answers are rather apparent, and they serve the narrative supremely well. They’ve worked together in that insurance office for so long, they know each other so well; and this bond of theirs — when it’s severely imperiled by Phyllis and Walter’s plan to defraud the very insurance company where Keyes employs Walter — becomes a powerful element in the story, providing it with an entirely other dimension. What would have otherwise been a story of mere love and murder — as if those weren’t enough — becomes a story about fraternal betrayal, too.

Their relationship also frames the narrative — don’t forget that. The scene that opens the movie is Neff confessing in his dictaphone to Keyes about all that’s happened, and it’s this confession that comprises the voiceover we hear throughout, that gives the movie its basic architecture. And what’s the final scene? Keyes encountering Walter, near-lifeless, as he finishes his confession. Even James M. Cain was willing to concede that this structure was superior to his own: “[Wilder’s] device for letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machine — I would have done it if I had thought of it.”

But who besides Wilder would have ever thought of casting Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff? Even MacMurray himself at first found the idea too alien to consider. He’d primarily been a romantic lead in screwball comedies, sometimes musicals, sometimes not, very often (four times) with Carol Lombard. Even though he was already under contract to Paramount at the time, he wasn’t sure they’d let him go play with Wilder in this tale of carnage and carnality. And if they did, what would it do to his career? Every time Wilder saw him — around town, on the studio lot, at the cafeteria — he’d badger him about taking the role. Finally MacMurray relented and agreed to ask Paramount’s permission. Because his contract was up for renegotiation, and because the negotiations were taking a somewhat rancorous turn, Paramount gladly let him do it, in the belief that it would hurt his star-shine and compromise him in contract talks.

What it did instead was demonstrate MacMurray’s remarkable range in this most counterintuitive of roles — a bravura bit of so-called stunt-casting long before that was even a phenomenon, let alone a functional phrase. But it should be said that not everyone was initially impressed with MacMurray’s Neff. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times found this character with no visible scars “a bit too ingenuous” to be believed “as the gent who falls precipitately under [Phyllis’s] spell,” while Manny Farber in The New Republic characterized MacMurray’s Neff as “a man who is really too smart to murder anyone.”

Of course, smart ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Crowther and Farber were apparently innocent of the power of the passions (which explains a lot about the turgidity of their writing), and, like everyone at the time, they were innocent of the techniques of film noir.

The phrase wouldn’t even come into use for another couple years, and by then Double Indemnity had both codified and perfected the genre. That rarely happens with any style of art — the work that establishes the template also establishing the ideal. Reportedly, Wilder on the set of Indemnity knew that he was making history and said so, but I doubt even Wilder himself knew the extent of it.

Wilder wags a finger while instructing his lead actors. (The policemen are there to keep an eye on the groceries. There was a war on; food was preciously rationed.)

There had been film noirs before, even some very good ones, but Indemnity is the first time anyone had taken all those elements we’re now so familiar with — the postwar cynicism, the femme fatale, the existentialism, the hardboiled voiceover, the German-expressionism-inspired photography, the urban setting, the jazzy score, the witty dialogue — and nestled them within such exquisite, fine packaging.

Wilder had worked with cinematographer John Seitz on his previous film, Five Graves to Cairo, on which he developed a real appreciation for Seitz’s willingness to take risks in the name of experimentation. There’s certainly a lot of photographic experimentation going on in Indemnity, most famously in the use of light slanted through window blinds, a look that would become more identified with noir than any other., the unofficial trademark of the genre.

And Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson would become the standard for all future film noir femme fatales. Like MacMurray, she was at first wary of playing such scandalous material, but Wilder was able to coax her into accepting by asking her simply, “Are you a mouse or an actress?” Actress that she was — professional that she was — she put on the wig Wilder proposed, white to register as platinum-blonde on the screen and, in the words of Wilder, to make Phyllis “look as sleazy as possible.” Buddy De Sylva, one of the film’s producers, took away a different impression. “We hire Barbara Stanwyck,” he complained, “and here we get George Washington.”

Four weeks into shooting, Wilder realized he’d made a big mistake, but by then it was too late. He tried to explain it away as an intentional effect that went misunderstood — the phony wig, you see, was supposed to symbolize the phoniness of the character — but ultimately he came clean, owning up to his blunder.

No one ever talks about Phyllis Dietrichson without talking about the ankle bracelet she wears on the fateful day when Walter comes calling at her home to check on Mr. Dietrichson’s auto-insurance policy.

It was a transgressive bit of costuming, instantly signalling to the audience that this is a woman of what used to be called “loose morals” — that this Mrs. Dietrichson is a dame who’s hot to trot. It was a way of smuggling valuable information past the censors.

‘That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson.’

But when I think of Stanwyck’s performance in Indemnity, I always think of the orgasmic look on her face — its glow and glare — when Walter ultimately consummates the crime by killing her husband, strangling him in the seat beside her. If this woman is a sexual friend — and it’s fair to say that she is — then she’s a sexual fiend for whom murderous greed carries at least as much power as erotic passion.

Stanwyck is sexy in this movie — there’s no way around it — and her sexiness is crucial in getting us to buy her persuasiveness, which in turn is crucial in getting us to buy MacMurray as a man capable of murder. Chandler also deserves some credit here for the way his voiceover — none of which comes from Cain’s novel — is written with the kind of intensity that can come only from a man of passion. Driving upscale L.A.’s bucolic streets after leaving the Dietrichson home, he says in voiceover: “It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

Much later on, after the deed is done and the insurance policy all but approved, we see Walter at his apartment — where, strangely, there are no fewer than five framed photos of vintage pugilists on the wall.

There’s also one each on at least two other walls.

He’s waiting for Phyllis so they can have one of their clandestine conversations. Before Phyllis can arrive, however, Keyes pays a surprise visit to voice his renewed doubts about the legitimacy of the claim. Will Walter find his fierceness and actually kill Keyes? After all, Keyes is essentially investigating Walter’s crime, even if he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing? As it happens, Walter doesn’t kill Keyes, Phyllis does arrive, and Walter manages to make sure the two never meet. All the while, the audience sweats.

There are two other such scenes of supreme suspense in Indemnity. Although there’s no question the best of the movie’s language comes from Chandler, he and Wilder were very much collaborators in constructing these moments of delicious tension. They also managed to work in a couple intensifying subplots, involving Phyllis’s stepdaughter (she’s on to them) and a young man Phyllis is screwing behind Walter’s back. These elements of the story hardly even registered with me on my first one or two viewings — it’s as if the movie already gives your nerves too much to process — but on later viewings they’ve added a welcome depth and complexity to the story.

And what about those photos on Water’s wall? I do believe — though I’m far from certain — that the framed photos of vintage pugilists that adorn his apartment are meant to signal to us that this is a man with a fighting spirit, with violence in his soul, capable of rough acts that belie his smooth nature. It’s true, what he says into the dictaphone (by way of personal description as if giving a mock deposition), that he has “no visible scars,” but I would advise Farber and Crowther, and all the many who fall in with their line of thinking, that the key word there is “visible.” And if there’s one thing that Double Indemnity demonstrates — what film noirs in general demonstrate — it’s that we all have scars, even if they’re apparent only in the right slanted light.