Double Indemnity

Considered by many to be the quintessential film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a masterpiece of the style and a relentlessly entertaining concoction of greed, betrayal, and lust that contains some of the cycle’s most iconic lines (“I killed him for money and a woman; I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman”). Even 80 years after its release, the film is astonishingly mature and sophisticated, achieving the impossible task of making insurance sexy. When Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) arrives at the Dietrichson house to renew insurance policies, only the woman of the house is available: Phyllis Dietrichson is gorgeous, lonely, and conniving, and the moment she inquires about taking out an accident policy on her husband, Neff knows exactly where things are headed. Of course, he can’t resist her and her “honey of an anklet.” The murder scheme appears to be going “straight down the line” as planned, but this is film noir, so a bounty of plot twists will upend the proceedings and forestall happy endings. Every scene, every performance, every nuance is brilliantly executed, but pay special attention to Wilder’s visual innovation (light from Venetian blinds incarcerates Walter the moment he enters the Dietrichson living room, for example) and Chandler’s perfectly provocative dialogue (the “suppose I” exchange in the first scene is a master class in mutual seduction).