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

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.