Themes: Perfect Crime, Femmes Fatales, Cons and Scams
Main Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather
Release Year: 1944
Country: US
Run Time: 107 minutes
Plot
Directed by Billy Wilder and adapted from a James M. Cain novel by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity represents the high-water mark of 1940s film noir urban crime dramas in which a greedy, weak man is seduced and trapped by a cold, evil woman amidst the dark shadows and Expressionist lighting of modern cities. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) into murdering her husband to collect his accident policy. The murder goes as planned, but after the couple's passion cools, each becomes suspicious of the other's motives. The plan is further complicated when Neff's boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a brilliant insurance investigator, takes over the investigation. Told in flashbacks from Neff's perspective, the film moves with ruthless determinism as each character meets what seems to be a preordained fate. Movie veterans Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Robinson give some of their best performances, and Wilder's cynical sensibility finds a perfect match in the story's unsentimental perspective, heightened by John Seitz's hard-edged cinematography. Double Indemnity ranks with the classics of mainstream Hollywood movie-making. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide
Review
Billy Wilder only made one proper film noir, but it was a doozy: Double Indemnity is one of the most unrelentingly cynical films the genre produced, with a pair of career-changing performances from Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray and a script by Wilder and Raymond Chandler every bit as black-hearted as James M. Cain's novel Three of a Kind, on which the film was based. The idiosyncratically attractive Stanwyck, generally thought of as pretty but hardly a bombshell, was rarely as sexy as she was as Phyllis Dietrichson, and never as sleazy; Phyllis knows how to use her allure to twist men around her little finger, and from the moment Walter Neff lays eyes on her, he's taken a sharp turn down the Wrong Path, as Phyllis oozes erotic attraction at its least wholesome. While MacMurray was best known as a "nice guy" leading man (an image that stuck with him to the end of his career), he was capable of much more, and he gave perhaps the finest performance of his life as Walter Neff, a sharp-talking wise guy who loses himself to weak, murderous corruption when he finds his Achilles Heel in the brassy blonde Phyllis. (MacMurray's only role that rivalled it was as the heartless Mr. Sheldrake in The Apartment, also directed by Wilder.) And, while they followed the Hays Code to the letter, Wilder and Chandler packed this story with seething sexual tension; Neff's morbid fascination with Phyllis's ankle bracelet is as brazenly fetishistic as 1940s filmmaking got. Double Indemnity was not a film designed to make evil seem attractive -- but it's sure a lot of fun to watch. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
This article is about the life insurance clause. For the 1944 film noir, see Double Indemnity (film).
Double indemnity is a clause or provision in a life insurance or accident policy whereby the company agrees to pay the stated multiple (i.e. double) of the face amount in the contract in cases of accidental death. An accidental death is a death that is neither intentionally caused by a human being, such as murder or suicide, nor from natural causes, such as cancer or heart disease.
In 2004, 4.67% of all deaths in the United States were declared accidental.[1] For this reason, double-indemnity clauses are usually relatively cheap and often aggressively marketed, especially to people over 45. Children and people in dangerous jobs, such as heavy construction, are the exceptions.[2]
