Double Indemnity (1944) a Classic Film Noir vs a Hardboiled Novel (1943)

A Noir Classic

Directed by Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Ace In The Hole, The Apartment, Kiss Me Stupid).

Written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (creator of Philip Marlowe) and based on the James M. Cain novel. 

Cinematography was by John F. Seitz (The Lost Weekend, Appointment With Danger, Rogue Cop, Sunset Blvd.), Music by Miklós Rózsa (Naked City, Asphalt Jungle, Spellbound, Ben-Her and more).

The film Stars Fred MacMurray (The Texas Rangers a good late 1930s Western BTW, Pushover, The Apartment and of course TV) as Walter Neff. Barbara Stanwick (Ball of Fire, Lady of Burlesque, The Strange loves of Martha Ivers, Sorry Wrong Number, No man Of Her Own) as Phyllis Dietrichson, Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar, Night Has A Thousand Eyes, Scarlett Street, The Woman In The Window and others) as Keyes, Jean Heather as Lola Dietrichson. Tom Powers as Mr. Dietrichson, Byron Barr as Nino Zachetti. 

The Story

(Film - Novel)

Night. Downtown. Los Angeles. Maybe Main Street. Track work. "Toledo Torches" aka flaming kerosene road flares, outline the work area. They look like those old 1930s era round balls with lit fuses they drew for cartoon bombs. 

The sidewalks to either side are lit by ranks of dual-lamp UM-1906 electroliers receding as they climb an incline. Overhead a web of trolley wires crosses between gray high rise office buildings.  

A welder from the Los Angeles Railway maintenance of way crew has a cover open and the arcing from his carbon rod is erratically strobing the scene. In the distance two headlights approach. A 1938 Dodge Business Coupe comes careening down the street. The flagman jumps up and flags the car frantically to the right. You're thinking drunk driver. 

We follow the coupe as it cuts through intersections, swerving around cars and trucks. It parks in front of an office building. The driver gets out and walks up to the glass doors and knocks. He's slightly hunched over.  A night watchman who doubles as the elevator operator unlocks the door and lets Walter Neff in.

Walt's an insurance salesman who works for Pacific All Risk Insurance Company. He rides up the elevator to the office floor. He walks into Claims Manager Barton Keyes office. Pulls out a fresh cylinder for the dictaphone and sits. We see a bloodstain in his left shoulder and as Neff speaks into the machine we get a flashback to how it all started. 

Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff

Cains novel starts right here at the start of this flashback. 

Walter Neff tells us that he was over in Glendale seeing about some leads and on his way back to Pacific he detoured over to Hollywoodland to remind a client named Dietrichson, two weeks before two of his automobile policies that are  about to lapse. 

In the novel Walters last name is Huff rather than Neff in the film. After seeing on three car insurance policies, he drops by Nirdlinger's (Dietrichson's in Film) Spanish style house in Hollywoodland to remind him about his auto policies about to lapse. He talks his way past the maid who opens the door. 

He's a good insurance man. Walter is left standing in the living room and is met by Mrs. Nirdlinger wearing house pajamas. She asks him "if there is anything I could do for you?"

The first meet between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson. 

In the film Double Indemnity,  Phyllis is wrapped in a beach towel and standing on landing above the foyer.  Water he gets an eye full and likes what he sees. It's not a lot, it's the idea put there with that image, the knowledge that she's naked and she's been naked during her sunbath. 

Barbara Stanwick as Phyllis Dietrichson

The novel she's wearing blue house pajamas that when she walks reveals  her body underneath. So we can use our imaginations again of course. But it's going to work a lot better for someone who was around back then who would know what James M. Cain was referring to. With wonders of google behold below. 

A 1940's shear house pajamas ad rt.,  and an artists rendition of something close to how revealing the blue pajamas, Phyllis would have been wearing, may have been.

So if there had been no Motion Picture Production Code or Legion of Decency holding back creative freedom, something like the above is what hooked thirty-five year old Walter on Phyllis. Sex.

Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler in the film have to make do with sexy suggestive dialog. Earlier When Walter first meets Phyllis in her towel Walter smiles suggestively at her after she asks him "if there's anything she can do for him?" He tells her about the lapsing car policies and that he "hates for her to have a smashed fender while she's not ""fully covered."" She tells him she knows what he means because she's been taking a sun bath. Walter yuk's it up a bit answering that he hoped there weren't any pigeons around.

Its great dialog and it gets the idea that its sex that is going to be Walters downfall across. 

Phyllis gets dressed and they talk about her husband's car policies that are about to lapse. She tells Neff that she should pay more attention to such matters and that he, her husband has been talking about the Automobile Club of America. Walter tells her the membership cost is an addition. 

Phyllis offers Walter a drink of ice tea and they talk of mutual attractions in Classic Hollywood "codespeak." 

Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He'll be in then.

Walter Neff: Who?

Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren't you?

Walter Neff: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.

Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

Walter Neff: How fast was I going, officer?

Phyllis: I'd say around ninety.

Walter Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Walter Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Walter Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.

Walter Neff: That tears it.

In the film Phyllis calls Neff's secretary and arranges a meeting the next day with Neff and her husband. 

In the novel Walter senses that something is up. He thinks Phyllis is going to proposition him with splitting the commission so that she could get a ten spot out of it. It's happened to him before. But then she starts walking around the room showing Walter everything she's got "under those blue pajamas was a shape to drive a man nuts." He doesn't know how he's going to handle it but he doesn't have to because she stops and suddenly looks at him and asks if he handles accident insurance.? 

That question send a chill down Walters back. He answers "we handle all kinds." She tells him to come back tomorrow night at 7:30 after dinner. 

In the novel Huff goes back to the office, and is called into Claims Manager Barton Keyes and they deal with the same false truck fire claim as in the film. They found wood shavings under crankcase and kerosene. 

Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes

The film has most of the same plot points as the novel. Walter goes back to the Dietrichson's. Only Phyllis is there alone its the maids day off and her husband had to see about a well that's coming in. They make some small talk and  Phyllis asks him point blank if she could get accident insurance for her husband without him knowing about it. 

Walter accuses her of the worst. He goes through a litany of "accidents" that turned out to be murders. He grabs his hat and walks out. 

Of course it goes Noirsville because Phyllis has already hooked Neff good and he goes back to see her. Neff tells her that he is going to kill her husband and that she is going to help him. We see a scene where Neff is lounging, laying spread out on a couch Phyllis is sitting at his feet, She is touching up her makeup. Subtext they just had sex. 

The plan is to set up a meeting with her husband with a witness when they trick him into signing accident insurance.  He's going to put his signature on a third document for accident insurance when he renews his auto policies..

It starts going Noirsville because the witness is Lola Dietrichson. Lola we discover is seeing a young man named Nino Zachetti. After the papers are signed and Neff is about to split he finds Lola in his car asking for a ride into Hollywood. Neff starts regretting the plan now after meeting the daughter.

Jean Heather as Lola Dietrichson

If you've never seen the film or read the Cain novel, stop right here or at the last image because there's spoilers below the images. 

Noirsville

Raymond Chandler seated as extra

Tom Powers as Mr. Dietrichson

<spoilers>

In the film, Lola, after her father is found dead and Nino dumps her for Phyllis, turns to Walter for comfort. She tells him that Phyllis was her mother's nurse and that she believes that Phyllis deliberately exposed her mother to the elements where she caught pneumonia by locking her out of the Lake Arrowhead house in the winter. She died a few days later in a delirium and Phyllis eventually married her father. She also tells Walter that she caught Phyllis trying on her widows weeds two days before her father died and she tells Walter that she will tell the police and the insurance investigator what she saw, and that she believes the Nino has helped kill her father. 

From Keyes' investigation of Phyllis, Walter finds out that the accomplice they suspect helped kill Dietrichson is Nino Zachetti. Nino has showed up on a handful of nights to meet with Phyllis. 

He is getting two timed by Zachetti, and so as a way out, Neff hatches a plan to kill Phyllis and frame Zachetti for it. 

In the novel there's a few more layers of story. As in the film, Lola confides in Walter Huff and tells him about Phyllis' past with her mother, and Nino's liaisons with Phyllis.  

It's here in the novel where Walter tells himself "I had killed a man for money and a woman. I didn't have the money, and I didn't have the woman."  Lola and Walter take long drives together... Huff finds himself falling in love with her.

In the novel Phyllis is wound just a bit tighter than the film ever lets on. Before Phyllis became Mrs. Dietrichson's nurse, she was a well know head nurse in some Los Angeles medical facility, and she became a frequent visitor at an institution for children run by a Dr. Sachetti. 

There were three children there that were related to Phyllis. To one of them she was some sort of a guardian / executrix, of a large estate worth a lot of money. Money to which she would inherit should something happen to that child. All three children died of pneumonia. The scandal about it killed Dr. Sachetti. Nino began researching back into Phyllis' past and found five other similar cases. So Phyllis is a serial "mercy" killing psycho with a Death Angel complex.  Cain throws in some sardonic humour throughout the novel.

Phyllis, after Huff tells her that he will kill her husband....

"He's not happy. He'll be better off - dead"

"Yeah?"

"That's not true is it?"

"Not from where he sits, I don't think."

"I know it's not true. I tell myself it's not true. But there's something in me. I don't know what. Maybe I'm crazy. But there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death sometimes. In a scarlet shroud floating through the night. I'm so beautiful then and sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy by taking them out where I am into the night, away from all trouble all unhappiness. .." 

Lola deduces that Shacetti had nothing to do with killing her father after she was eavesdropping on a conversation between Nino and Phyllis. Nino was putting the touch on Phyllis for money. If he'd killed her father he wouldn't be needing any money. 

She tells Walter that she will testify that she walked in on Phyllis in her bedroom and she was wearing some kind of foolish red silk thing on her that looked like a shroud or something with her face all smeared up in white powder and red lipstick, with a dagger in her hand and making faces in the mirror. Lola tells Walter that she'll ask the investigators to ask Phyllis why she was down in a boulevard store a week before her father died pricing dark mourning dresses. Walter decides to kill Phyllis. (Remember these incidents._

The grim finale goes like this in the novel. 

Walter decides to kill her in Griffiths Park and arranges to meet her there late night at a certain spot. He parks his car at the side of a bridal path that's close by the "spot." Walter explains that the roads through the park follow the  mountain contours on a low grade as they climb in long zig-zags but a bridal path near the spot goes right up the hillside. It would take a car ten to fifteen minutes to go from where Walter parked his car to the "spot," but a minute or two by the bridal path. He can do his deed and be gone before anybody knows he was there.

He then steals Nino's car so it would look like it was Nino killed Phyllis. He's going to have Phyllis get into the car then let it roll off a hillside. He's going to keep the drivers side door ajar and bail out just before it goes over the edge. 

Phyllis figures out what's cooking gets to the rendezvous first and shoots Huff in the chest while he's still in Nino's car.  He gets out of the car heads down the bridal path and passes out at the wheel of his car. He wakes up in the hospital. He was found by Lola who was following Huff and by Nino who was looking for Phyllis (she had broken off her date with Nino that night and was asking lots of questions about Griffiths Park. Nino was worried that Lola was going to be her next victim). 

Keyes thinks he's figured it all out that it was Lola and Nino who killed her old man. Keyes tells Huff that Lola will confess once she gets the rubber hose treatment from the police. 

Huff in love with Lola tells Keyes that he killed Nirdlinger. 

Of course that gets the insurance company off but they don't want all the bad publicity of a trial. So Huff has to write it all out in an affidavit and get it notarised, which is the novel we're reading. Keyes tells tells Walter how disappointed he was with him  He states to Walter that he won't even be well enough to testify for at least a week. So Keyes, explains that he made a reservation for him on a ship leaving San Piedro and heading for Mexico under a fake name, he can escape to Mexico if he gets lucky.  

Huff tells us that he did all Keyes asked when on board ship and slept through the night into the next afternoon. He tells us he went up on deck found his deck chair and sat down and watched to coast of . Mexico. He thinking it all over about Keyes reactions to everything and he gets a sinking feeling. He suddenly hears a gasp. Its Phyllis. How noir is this? 

How picaresque of Cain to have Keyes offer Phyllis the same deal.

"You"

"Hello Phyllis."

"Your man Keyes is quite the matchmaker."

"Oh yea he's romantic."

Phyllis goes on to tell Walter that the whole case broke out, and that everyone knows about them. It's a good thing that they are booked under different names. All the passengers are reading about it on the ships newspaper. Walter questions Phyllis's demeanor.

"You don't seem worried."

"I've been thinking of something else."

She smiled then, the sweetest, saddest smile you ever saw. I thought of the five patients, three little children, Mrs Nirdlinger, Nirdlinger and myself. It didn't seem possible that anybody who could be as nice as she was when she wanted to be, could have done those things. 

"What were you thinking about?"

"We could be married Walter."

"We could be , and then what?"

I don't know how long we sat looking out to sea after that. She started it again. "There's nothing ahead of us is there Walter?"

"No. Nothing."

"I don't even know where we're going, do you Walter?"

"No."

"... Walter the time has come."

"What do you mean Phyllis?"

"For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I've ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stern of this ship. Then little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart."

Walter replies "I'll give you away."

Here is a final bit of James M. Cain's sardonic humour. How Noir of him. Phyllis replies "What?"

"I mean: I'll go with you.? \"

"It's all that's left, isn't it?"

They walk around the ship a sailor tells them that there's a shark following them. They see a flash of dirty white down in the green. Phyllis tells Walter she wants to do it by moonlight. "I want to see that  fin. That black fin. Cutting though the water in the moonlight. 

Huff tells us that the bleeding has started again where his lung got grazed. It's not much but I spit blood. I keep thinking about that shark.

I'm writing this in the stateroom. It's about half past nine. She's in her stateroom getting ready. She's made her face chalk white with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks. She's got that red thing on. It's awful-looking. It's just one big square of red silk that she wraps around her, but it's got no arm holes, and her hands look like stumps underneath it when she moves them around. She looks like what came aboard the ship in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I didn't here her stateroom door open but she's beside me now while I'm writing. I can feel her.

The moon.

The film is a Classic Hollywood Film Noir, as is. a 10/10

But there is another tale to be told that could again follow the novel and be a different film or mini series. In Wilders streamlined version the real importance of the Lola - Walter relationship is missing, all of Nino's amateur detective work and his relationship with Phyllis mostly gone, and the Angel of Death angle jettisoned along with Walter and Phyllis' suicide. The suicide which is the true Noir ending to anyone familiar with the French Poetic Realist Noir. 

Warren Criswell's artistic renditions of James M. Cain's end of Double Indemnity.