Film Analysis Of Double Indemnity Film Studies Essay

From the moment they met, it was murder! This is the legendary tag line for Billy Wilders most incisive film noir, Double Indemnity, even though in 1944, when it was first released in New York on September 11, critics called it a melodrama, a elongated dose of premeditated suspense, with a pragmatism evocative of earlier period French films [poetic realism of the 1930s], with characters as rough, solid and inflexible as steel.

Even though James M. Cain is accredited as the original novel and Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder contribute to screenplay credit, the film is in fact based on the case of Ruth Snyder, a criminal murderess who breathed her last breath in the electric chair on January 13, 1928. Supported by Miklos Rozsas throbbing film score and John Seitzs expressionistic black-and-white camera work, Wilder had no valid idea he was filming in a technique called noir; he found out about this many years later, to his great astonishment.

In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a to some extent cute but dim insurance agent, becomes prey to the charms of a flirtatious blonde, Phyllis Dietrieckson. (Barbara Stanwyck), an anklet-sporting femme fatale/housewife. She plots to kill her husband in a railroad mishap that would bring her a double indemnity insurance imbursement. What makes this film a wonderful case in point of the culture and style of film noir is that, as stated by the movie production convention of the period, jealousy becomes a part of Walters relationship with Phyllis after he does the crime. Thinking she has an additional, much younger admirer, he murders her in a rage of jealousy, then in all probability bleeds to death from a shot fired by the perishing Phyllis, having first relegated the complete story of the film in a two-hour flashback. (In the new novel, Walter and Phyllis go off jointly on a journey, happily back together.) in accordance with with the crime doesnt pay principles of the era, Billy Wilder even added a shot of Neff dying in the San Quentin gas chamber, but thought the film looked better with the film concluding as Neff hears the wails of police and/or ambulance sirens approaching. Double Indemnity is the most excellent example of a noir film to date: rough as sandpaper, with acerbic, wrenching dialogue and practical sets. Watch Walter and Phyllis as they get together in a luminous white southern California superstore, sporting dark glasses, not shopping or still watching each other while plotting up plans for a homicide. And those magnificent lines: Yes, I killed him for money and for a woman. I didnt get the money and I didnt get the woman. Pretty, isnt it?, There was no way in the world I may perhaps have known that murder occasionally can smell like honeysuckle, or I couldnt hear my footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man,.

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Double Indemnity moreover has a homoerotic bond between Walter Neff and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the claims examiner who believes Phyllis, but not Walter, of the crime. Wilder underplayed the father-son relationship in addition to the police routine constituent that could have made his film a detective tale more willingly than a twisty noir, which is what it in actuality is. Wilder took the focal point off Robinsons role and cultivated his viewpoint, in disparity to the many detective films of the age that instigated in novels of Raymond Chandler, his co-conspirator. By modeling Double Indemnity into a homicidal melodrama with sexual insinuations, Wilder produced a rational crime accomplishment.

The Book and The Film

Wilder’s film and Cain’s novel even supposing it does not credit the book as its source. Body Heat can be expressed as a masquerading or unacknowledged remake, a film that repeats basic story units from the Cain novel (and Wilder adaptation) but changes the details of its name, location, period, character names and the those like it. For want of a screen credit recognizing the source property, the remake becomes a hypothetical construct or role of the film’s production and response. Imperative here is Cain’s standing, and the untimely 1980s revitalization of notice in Cain’s work, nevertheless more important is Double Indemnity’s advantaged place in the noir principle. A small number would refute that Double Indemnity is a perfect film noir and one of the most significant movies in Hollywood history. It was an unconventional film, challenging almost a decade of Production Code battles to Cain’s literature. Frank Krutnik in the same way declares that Double Indemnity was traditionally significant in the growth of the 1940s erotic crime thriller, setting up through its depiction of the Cain tale a model for the story structures of following film noirs. Lately, Brian De Palma (whose reverence to Alfred Hitchcock are well known) has paid compliment to film noir, by the opening scene in Femme Fatale (2002) with the title character, Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), mirrored in a hotel room television screen as she gazes at the Barbara Stanwyck model in Double Indemnity. These instances of Double Indemnity’s repute and standing in film history help make clear why critics such as Leitch openly match up Body Heat to Wilder’s version, but do not take heed to Double Indemnity had previously been more honestly remade as a lesser-known movie for television, intended for by Jack Smight in 1973.

Double Indemnity starts with Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), bleeding from a bullet wound, stumbling into his office in the Pacific Insurance Building. Neff talks into his dictaphone and his narrative of an unholy love and an just about perfect crime unfurls in flashback. Neff is an insurance salesman who becomes entangled with the beautiful and treacherous Phyllis. Phyllis encourages Walter not only to lend a hand her take out a $100,000 life insurance policy on her spouse, but also to assist her in murdering him. Jointly they simulate Dietrichson’s inadvertent death in order to meet the criteria for the ‘double indemnity’, but things go awry when Neff’s manager, Barton Keyes, starts to infer murder. Neff starts an acquaintance with Phyllis’s step-daughter Lola, who suspects that Phyllis has started going out with her (Lola’s) previous boyfriend Nino Zachetti. Believing he has been deceived, Neff plots a plan to murder Phyllis and trap Zachetti. In an argument in the gloomy, Dietrichson sitting room, Walter slays Phyllis, but not before she gravely stabs him. Towards the end, the narrative turns back to the current day where the dying Walter is reassured by the paternal Keyes.

Even though Wilder’s Double Indemnity is frequently thought of as the ‘original’ alongside which Kasdan’s noir remake is weighed up, Body Heat can more generally be seen as a remaking of Cain’s composition (or no less than those works by which he is best kept in mind). Some critics go as far as to dispute that Double Indemnity was a case of auto-citation, produced by [Cain] in full familiarity of the fact that he was paying his own homage to [The] Postman’:

Both tell fundamentally a similar story: an all too obedient male is enchanted

by a physically powerful and scheming lady. With her inspiring it and with him

ironing out of the details, the disloyal couple carry out a perfect murder of the

woman’s husband. Afterward, when they are practically free, providence (or irony)

swipes them with its gigantic lumbering paw and they are given their just desserts

but for different reasons.

Such an association makes possible for one to recognize noir essentials for example the hard-boiled conversation and portrayal of bare (and graphic) animal covetousness that are universal to both The Postman and Double Indemnity. For example, Body Heat is considered for dialogue for example Ned’s ‘You shouldn’t wear that body’, and Matty’s ‘You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man’. On the other hand, at an even higher plane of generalization, it can be said that Body Heat at the same time refers to and remakes the noir genre to which its intertexts belong.

Film Noir

For a moment or two, both the problem movies and the semi documentary crime thrillers made it appear that Italian neorealism had established a habitat in an anxious, if prosperous, America. One of the preeminent things that is taking place in Hollywood is the propensity to move out of the placeto support imaginary pictures on information and, more significantly, to shoot them not in decorated studio sets but in authentic places. But an additional assortment of postwar American film, one which was dependent on the restricted environment of the studio on top of bona fide locations for its representation of the sordid underbelly of American life, soon became apparent. This was film noir (more exactly, “black film”), invented and named by French critics in 1946 when, experiencing American motion pictures for the first time ever since 1940, they alleged a weird and wonderful new mood of cynicism, dimness, and depression in definite crime films and melodramas. They came up with the term from the “Serie Noire” detective pulp fiction books then all the rage in France, many of which were renditions of works by members of the “hard-boiled” genre of American crime authorsDashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain (afterward coupled by Mickey Spillane, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson)whose books were also recurrently tailored in films noir. In the vein of the novels, these films were set apart by a subdued atmosphere and realistic violence, and they presented postwar American cynicism to the extent of nihilism by presuming the total and hopeless corruption of society and of everyone in it. Billy Wilder’s acidic Double Indemnity (1944), which shocked Hollywood in the year of its release and was just about banned by the authorities, may be considered as the archetype for film noir, even though some critics trace the origins back to such rough but significantly less pessimistic films as This Gun for Hire, High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Stranger on the Third Floor. Modified by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novel, Double Indemnity is the squalid story of a Los Angeles insurance agent (Fred MacMurray) sexually ensnared by a client’s wife into killing off her husband for his death reimbursement; it has been declared a film without a solitary trace of compassion or love.

Without a doubt, these are characters remarkably missing from all films noir, as conceivably they seemed not present from the postwar America which created them. Like Double Indemnity, these films succeeded upon the unembellished interpretation of greed, desire, and unkindness because their fundamental theme was the profundity of human immorality and the absolutely unheroic character of human beingslessons that were almost not taught but without doubt re-emphasized by the one of its kind horrors of World War II. Nearly everyone of the dark films of the late forties take the structure of crime melodramas for the reason that (as Dostoevsky and Dickens recognize) the devices of crime and criminal detection afford an ideal metaphor for dishonesty that cuts across conformist moral classes. These films are frequently set in southern Californiathe geographical archetype for a social order in which the breach between anticipation and reality is determined through mass hallucination. The central characters are regularly unfeeling antiheroes who chase their foundation designs or basically drift aimlessly from side to side in sinister night worlds of the metropolitan American harsh world, but they are even more frequently decent people trapped in traps set for them by a crooked social order. In this concluding sense, film noir was immeasurably a cinema of moral nervousness of the kind experienced at various times in postwar Eastern Europe, most lately in Poland at the pinnacle of the Solidarity groupi.e., a cinema about the environments of life enforced on truthful people in a untruthful, self-deluding society.

The moral unsteadiness of this world was rendered into a visual style by the expert noir cinematographers John Alton, Nicholas Musuraca, John F. Seitz, Lee Garmes, Tony Gaudio, Sol Polito, Ernest Haller, Lucien Ballard, and James Wong Howe. These technical masters turned into moral vagueness obviously real through what has been called anti conventional cinematography. The method incorporated the all-encompassing use of wide-angle lenses, allowing even more and greater depth of field but causing animated deformation in close-ups; inconspicuous lighting and night-for-night filming (that is, essentially shooting night scenes at nighttime more willingly than in bright daylight with dark filters), both of which produce ruthless contrasts between the light and dark spheres of the frame, with dark outweighing, to match the moral disorder of the world; and pointed, unnatural set-ups. If all of this spears to be suggestive of the artificial studio modus operandi of German Expressionism, it ought to, for the reason thatlike the Universal horror phase of the thirtiesfilm noir was fashioned to a large degree by German and Eastern European migrs, a lot of of whom had gained their basic training at UFA in the twenties and near the beginning of the thirties. The noir directors Lang, Siodmak, Wilder, Preminger, Brahm, Litvak, Ophls, Dieterle, Sirk, Ulmer, and Bernhardt; the director-cinematographer Rudolph Mat; the cinematographers Karl Freund and John Alton; and the musicians Franz Waxman and Max Steiner had all been linked with or inclined by the UFA studio technique.

On the other hand, given its subject matter, film noir could barely break out of the general pragmatic predisposition of the postwar cinema, and noir directors recurrently shot outside shots on location. Such wartime modernizations as slighter camera dollies and moveable power packs, higher speed lenses and additionally sensitive, fine-grain film rolls cut down the logistics of position shooting and aided to generate for film noir a nearly standardized visual method. For this motive, it has become trendy to discuss film noir as a category (some consider it is a genre) of “idealistic” or “expressive” pragmatism; but its inheritance includes such a wide variety of cultural influencesGerman Expressionism and shock exploitation, American gangster movies from the thirties, Sternbergian exoticism and self-indulgence, the graceful pragmatism of Carn, the case-hardened institution of American fiction, the forties cultural significance and fame of Freud, postwar American disenchantment (particularly a sagacity of sexual betrayal amongst GIs coming back home) and the flourish of cinematic practicality it created, cold war mistrust, and for sure, Citizen Kane that it is probably better to typify it as a cycle to a certain extent than to draw up the boundaries too rigidly.

Double Indemnity (1944), d. Billy Wilder, Paramount, 107min., b&w, sc. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain, ph. John Seitz, m. Miklos Rozsa, v. MCA.