I Would Like to See It: Double Indemnity

I don’t know that there’s another movie which so perfectly captures the gut-churning feeling of knowing you’ve done something that would not just disappoint but crush a beloved teacher. Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) walks around like he has a lead weight in his stomach after getting his head turned by a hundred grand and the heartless woman attached to it, the would-be widow Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), and pulling a murderous scam on her husband. There’s a sense of doom in everything he does and says, and not of the typical Tell-Tale Heart variety. Neff’s fatalistic turn comes because he knows he’s betrayed the trust of his boss and mentor, the eagle-eyed Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) whose judgment in the business of sniffing out phony insurance claims is the stuff of legend. Not only does Neff’s crime destroy their connection, it also proves that Barton’s judgment is fallible, his mentorship flawed.

This state of walking death consumes Neff for the better part of the film’s duration. “I couldn’t hear my own footsteps,” he says in voiceover, narrating his experiences in the crime’s immediate wake. “It was the walk of a dead man.” Later, mortally wounded and discovered, he mumbles something about “heading for the border”, an allusion not to Mexico but to a destination at once closer and far more distant. Even the manner of his discovery parallels a father catching his son in the act of wrongdoing, the camera pulling back from the protracted confession which is the film’s frame story to reveal that Keyes has been listening for an unknown length of time, one final humiliation for both teacher and protege. When the older man kneels to light a last cigarette for Neff, Neff’s traditional gesture of respect for him, the feeling of graceful failure is almost overwhelming.

None of this would play without Barbara Stanwyck as petulant, vicious, sociopathic Phyllis, a beautiful golden locket with nothing at all inside her. Imagine Bonnie and Clyde if, as soon as the famous crime spree began, Clyde wanted nothing more than to get away from his lover. Watching Stanwyck unfold to expose continually more vacuous and frightening depths, it’s not hard to understand the persistent appeal of the femme fatale, the snake and the apple combined in a single figure. If Neff is walking in the kingdom of the dead, Phyllis is already a resident by the time they meet, a woman who in the privacy of her bedroom tries on mourning clothes to see if they suit her. Wild’s dialogue crackles, his camera finds every shadowed corner and slant of smoky light, his cast are arch and earnest in perfect measure, but none of it works without the soul-sucking gravity of Stanwyck as a woman who wants everything and feels nothing at its center.