Content area
Full text
Double Indemnity (1944) is generally regarded as a classic of film noir, distinguished by the special acerbity of Billy Wilder's best efforts. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, it has not received the close critical attention reserved for such Wilder films as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Although film scholars often praise its tight structure, visual brilliance, and corrosive wit, Double Indemnity has, in effect, been relegated to that special category of "landmark" films, more interesting historically than cinematically.1
Perhaps the reason for the neglect of Double Indemnity is that wherever it is discussed, two persuasive and widely accepted interpretations seem to preclude further analysis; briefly, they are: first, that the film's major focus is on the sexual-financial relationship between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson; and second, that the Keyes-Neff relationship, characterized by a "sexual underpattem" of rivalry linked with a surrogate father-son conflict is the film's central concern.2 Yet reviewer Manny Farber, in The New Republic, was dissatisfied (and rightly so I think) with the Neff-Phyllis story as lacking in the necessary intensity to make their extreme deeds more credible ("there are not enough of the baser passions- sex, jealousy, hatred, fear of the other's deceit").3 And James Agee, in The Nation, also criticized Wilder's failure to bring to life "the sort of freezing rage of excitation which such a woman presumably inspires in such a fixer as Walter Neff. This sort of genre love-scene ought to smell like the inside of an overwrought Electrolux. Wilder has not made much, either, of the tensions of the separateness of the lovers after the murder, or of the coldly nauseated despair and nostalgia which the murderer would feel."4 Other commentators view Keyes as important, notably as a "paternalistic boss . . . representative of normality," but most would agree that "there is little sense in Wilder of human potentiality . . . only a sense of more or less acquiescence to the rottenness of life."5
Although both approaches to the film are valid, neither offers, in my view, a wholly satisfactory reason for its power and fascination. Like all of Wilder's films, Double Indemnity transcends its genre; just as Some Like It Hot uses the gangster-film tradition of the 1930s to illustrate that the cops-and-robbers games...