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| What unsuspecting imbecile would guess that this glamorously pink poster for Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity advertises one of the most notoriously devious thrillers of all time? |
QUICK REVIEW:
Barbara Stanwyck (The Lady Eve (1941)) is the 'woman without a conscience', who persuades insurance agent Neff (Fred MacMurray (The Caine Mutiny (1954))) to murder her husband for her, so as to collect the 'double indemnity'!
- And Edward G. Robinson (Key Largo (1948)) is the pedantic, deeply engaged boss Keyes, who in a manner of minutes explains to us the troubles of the insurance business.
Austrian-Hungarian master filmmaker Billy Wilder (The Apartment (1960)) wrote the adaptation of James M. Cain's (Mildred Pierce (1941)) 1936 novel with detective fiction specialist Raymond Chandler (The Blue Dahlia (1946)), and they created the snappy, dirty dialog that seems to nearly produce sparks between the leads.
Wilder himself was extremely proud and fond of Double Indemnity; especially the fact that Cain himself praised the film and some of its new devices as better than his own. Alfred Hitchcock wrote: "Since Double Indemnity, the two most important words in motion pictures is 'Billy' and 'Wilder'."
The film is also often called the first film noir, - a term that was unknown at the time, (until a French critic coined it in 1946.)
Watch the original trailer for the film here
Cost: 0.92 mil. $
Box office: 5.7 mil. $ (North America only)
= Big hit (at least)
[The Hollywood majors had been interested in adapting Cain's novel since its first publication in Liberty magazine, but the Hays Office Production Code of the day scared them from it, until Wilder and Paramount decided to do it against the Office's warnings several years later. Wilder and Chandler developed a tumultuous writers' friendship during the writing stage, and the film was shot around Los Angeles with 3 of the time's biggest stars, who, together with Wilder, 'ate' 40 % of the total budget: 0.1 mil. $ for Stanwyck, MacMurray and Robinson, and 70k$ for Wilder. The film was released to acclaim and some controversy over its theme of planning and carrying out a murder, unseen in major US movies at the time. The film's global gross is unknown, but it drew 1.8 mil. admissions in France in 1946 (after the end of WWII.) It got nominated for 7 Oscars but won none: Wilder ridiculed the big winner of the night, Leo McCarey and his Going My Way (1944), by sticking his foot out so that McCarey stumbled on his way to receive his Best Director Oscar. Double Indemnity inspired a well of imitations and has become a classic in American culture. It was re-released for two days in 2015 by TCM. Double Indemnity is # 83 on IMDb's Top 250 rated films, and it is certified fresh at 96 % with a 9 average on Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Double Indemnity?
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