Double Indemnity at 80: Billy Wilder and Barbara Stanwyck’s Caustic, Enduring Allure

By Hafsah Abbasi  |  July 11, 2024 | 3:30pm
Movies Features film noir
Double Indemnity at 80: Billy Wilder and Barbara Stanwyck’s Caustic, Enduring Allure
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In a post-New Hollywood landscape, many have come to look at Hays Code-era films as gaudy and brusque, as entirely too heavy on narration and telling. Naturalism is adulated; melodrama is out. Double Indemnity, 80 years later, remains one of many films that proves that the studio fare of yesteryear is worth celebrating. This is in no small part due to Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—her pitch-perfect performance adorned by platinum blonde bangs, overlined red lips and a velvety, deep voice made her a paragon of the femme fatale and a cornerstone of the trope for years to come. But Double Indemnity of course also owes much to its writer/director Billy Wilder, a maestro of caustic humor and writerly, narratively intricate film structures whose scripts compliment his conservative, theatrical directorial style—a style laden with static movement amid its chiaroscuro lighting.

Double Indemnity centers on insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who ostensibly gets roped into a murder scheme by the provocative Phyllis, intent on killing her husband. Drawn to her in seconds, it is Walter who comes up with a scheme to kill the husband, win Phyllis and live off a fraudulent accidental death claim. 

Contemporaneous reviews of Double Indemnity, such as in The New York Times, offered a sensationalist reading of the film. “Miss Stanwyck gives a good surface performance of a destructively lurid female, but Mr. MacMurray is a bit too ingenuous as the gent who falls precipitously under her spell,” wrote Bosley Crowther. “And the ease of his fall is also questionable. One looks at the lady’s ankles and he’s cooked.”

It’s a facile way to look at Double Indemnity (and somehow ahead of its time, in its use of slang). In Double Indemnity, Phyllis may “ruin” Walter’s life, but the idea that it is her tempestuous nature that overpowers him is one that is deliberately obtuse, maybe faulty at best. If it’s true, it’s only true in the sense that Walter wanted his life ruined by her. 

This is representative of the way in which, on the surface, Wilder’s film may be a tawdry, straightforward thriller that does little to subvert the unwritten ordinances of its time. But it’s more than this. Walter’s predicament suggests his initial veneration of Phyllis is rooted in a hollowness in his life. The film’s events, while seen through his lens, focalize her, because nothing else inspires verve in his quotidian existence. He chooses her again and again, with every terrible scheme he constructs. 

As we delve back into the past, we become familiar with both Phyllis’ powers of persuasion and Walter’s own culpability. Double Indemnity’s chronological narrative contrasts the obfuscation embedded in its bookends, which, in setting the movie’s framework around Walter’s admissions of wrongdoing, allows him to renege and displace his immorality onto Phyllis, even as, by Walter’s own admission, he carries the burden of the crimes he committed. 

The duo’s erratic relationship lends Double Indemnity its dramatic heft and self-conscious bent. Co-writers Wilder and Raymond Chandler treat their characters’ subjectivities earnestly even when heightening them to poke fun at the conventions they utilize. Quippy witticisms and showy, terse emotional vignettes coalesce to demonstrate the film’s balance of the shrewd and the garish.

Double Indemnity opens with a frame narrative, which sees Walter confessing his sins and schemes, regretful of these, and ostensibly regretful of his relationship with Phyllis. “Yes, I killed [Mr. Dietrichson],” Walter says at the start of the film, matter-of-factly. “I killed him for money, and I killed him for a woman. And I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?” Walter’s workplace is his confession booth, and it is through this admission that the melodramatic stakes are set. But unlike the dominant response to the film—which displaces the responsibility for criminal activity onto Phyllis—Walter takes responsibility for his own actions. 

Crowther isn’t entirely wrong, though. Phyllis enters the frames of Double Indemnity in just a towel, towering above Walter, one story above him as he gazes up at her from the first floor, and her substantial effect on Walter is apparent within moments. “I wasn’t a whole lot interested in goldfish then. I was thinking about the dame upstairs, and the way she had looked at me… and I wanted to see her again, close,” Walter says in voiceover. Perhaps Crowther failed to consider, however, that Double Indemnity isn’t merely a cautionary tale about being too down bad, but a broader portrait of malaise amid the monotony of middle-class, mid-life, middle American life. The careful focus on Phyllis’ legs as an introduction to her character sexualizes her, renders her the whore who’ll ruin Walter—who will titillate him into wrongdoing—rather than the Madonna who’ll reform his life. 

Sure, Walter makes enough money, but he’s 35 and unmarried. The scheme he concocts with Phyllis solves two problems of his: his singledom and his path to settling down in life, both romantically and financially. His machinations also necessitate that he need not radically alter the day-to-day existence of his life in monumental ways, beyond, of course, ostensibly coupling up with Phyllis. When you’re blasé about your own life, ironically, the last thing you want to do is put in the labor to change it. Your energy reserves are spent.

In Double Indemnity’s climactic scene, Walter arrives at Phyllis’ house, intending to inform her about his knowledge about a new plan of hers: to manipulate her stepdaughter, get her killed, and reap the insurance claim benefits for herself, in addition to perhaps killing Walter too.  “I’m all through thinking, baby,” Walter says. He parrots Crowther’s sentiment, saying, “I was a sucker. I’d have been brushed off as soon as you got your hands on the money.” Of course, this characterization of Phyllis—as the conniving seductress—serves as the perfect justification for Walter to subsequently threaten to kill her. Phyllis shoots him, and this is the nail in her coffin: He shoots to kill.

But it is Phyllis who dies on-screen, and Walter who (presumably) takes his final breaths off-screen. The Hays Code mandated that films were not to “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” and to “show the correct standards of life.” Accordingly, immoral characters died on-screen so as to display the repercussions of unethical ways of life.

Double Indemnity itself, then, operates in accordance with the dominant, quasi-sexist interpretations, through its frame narrative structure, its narration and dialogue, and its adherence to those encoded rules of morality. On its surface, it’s flashy and simple, doing little to subvert the unwritten decrees of its time. But Double Indemnity’s stuck around for a reason. Double Indemnity could have been less reliant on its Madonna-Whore complex or on noir conventions, but perhaps it’s even more alluring because of the glimpses of the complicated awfulness it tries to obscure. It’s also just impeccably, tightly constructed and extensively features Stanwyck’s legs, which is just about good enough to make any movie worthwhile.

Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.

 
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