Some Like It Wilder Read online

  Chandler and Wilder had initially planned to borrow as much of Cain’s tough, spare dialogue from the novelette as possible. As time went on, however, Chandler realized that the novella’s dialogue needed reworking for the screen. Wilder disagreed, Cain remembered, “and he was annoyed that Chandler wasn’t putting more of it in the script.” To settle the matter, Wilder enlisted a couple of contract players to read passages of Cain’s original dialogue from the book. “To Wilder’s astonishment, he found out it wouldn’t play,” said Cain. After the actors read a scene straight from the book, Chandler pointed out to Wilder that the dialogue sounded like “a bad high school play. The dialogue oversaid everything and, when spoken, sounded quite colorless and tame.”23

  As Chandler later told Cain in a consultation, “Jim, that dialogue of yours is for the eye,” not for the ear. “I tried to explain it to Billy.” Chandler continued, telling Cain that his clipped dialogue had no sting and even sounded flat when it was spoken aloud. Chandler added that the book’s dialogue, particularly the exchanges between Phyllis and Walter, had to be “sharpened and pointed” for the screen. Cain graciously replied that he fully understood why Chandler and Wilder had not used more of his “deathless dialogue” in the picture.24 The upshot is that the film’s taut, cynical dialogue owes more to Chandler and Wilder than it does to Cain. “We improved it quite a bit,” Wilder said later. He was impressed with the way Chandler could “get the flavor of California” into his flip and mordant writing, in both his scripts and his novels.25 Chandler, after all, was a native of Chicago who had been educated in England.

  The title of the film refers to the double insurance benefit paid out in the event of accidental death. Phyllis Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff, an insurance agent, into helping her murder her husband and making it look like an accident so they can cash in his insurance policy. Phyllis is confident that Walter can aid her in defrauding the insurance company, since he is employed by the firm that has insured her husband.

  Walter’s willingness to buy into Phyllis’s sordid moneymaking scheme brings clearly to prominence a theme that often surfaces in Wilder’s films. As Wilder himself formulated that theme, “People will do anything for money, except some people, who will do almost anything for money.” This is Wilder’s satirical comment on the erosion of values in our modern acquisitive society. Without a doubt, Walter is just as willing as Phyllis to do anything for money, not excluding homicide. In fact their love story is fundamentally grounded in their mutual desire to collect the death money.

  Although Chandler and Wilder had to revise Cain’s dialogue, at times they were able to employ a passage from the novella just as Cain wrote it. For example, in the book Walter admits that he had considered bilking the insurance company that employed him long before he met Phyllis; Chandler and Wilder reproduced this passage virtually intact in the film. Walter begins by explaining how he has become an expert in heading off policyholders who try to defraud the company. He continues, “You’re like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don’t crook the house. And then one night you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself and do it smart, because you’ve got the wheel right smack under your hands. You know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out front, a shill to put down the bet. Suddenly the doorbell rings, and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you.”26

  Andrew Sarris complained that Wilder offered no satisfactory explanation for Neff’s transformation into a killer: “I have never been able to perceive the motivational moment in which Walter Neff, the breezy insurance salesman and devil-may-care womanizer, is transformed into a purposeful murderer.”27 John Gregory Dunne responded, “The answer has always seemed obvious to me: Phyllis Dietrichson gave Walter Neff an erection, and from that moment on Neff’s underdeveloped common sense took up residence in his scrotum.”28 In sum, Alan Woolfolk says, “The manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson provides the opportunity and perhaps some additional incentive, to which Walter is entirely susceptible.”29

  The dark, brooding atmosphere of the film, coupled with the equally somber vision of life reflected in this tale of obsession and murder, marks Double Indemnity as belonging to that class of American melodramas that French film critics christened around that time film noir (dark film). This trend in American cinema was just surfacing when Wilder made Double Indemnity during World War II. The pessimistic view of life exhibited in such movies was an outgrowth of the disillusionment that would continue into the cold war. Others see film noir as a specific style of filmmaking that can be applied to various genres. To be precise, a noir film can be identified by its grim, sinister tone and its bleak, cynical thematic vision. Film noir depicts a stark night world peopled by characters who are trapped in a decadent, crime-ridden society.30

  Foster Hirsch opines that “the best noir directors were German or Austrian expatriates who shared a world view that was shaped by their bitter personal experiences of . . . escaping from a nation that had lost its mind.” Thus some of Wilder’s films, like Double Indemnity, can be deemed examples of film noir. “The group of expatriate directors who were to become the masters of the noir style,” Hirsch continues, brought to their American films a predilection for “stories about man’s uncertain fate, and about psychological obsession and derangement.”31 Double Indemnity is very much in keeping with the conventions of film noir, with its spare, unvarnished realism, typified by the stark, newsreel-like quality of the cinematography, especially in the scenes that occur in sleazy places at night.

  Ed Muller noted that “Double Indemnity was a trend-setting film, which helped to establish film noir.”32 That Double Indemnity was in the vanguard of film noir movies is evident from a seminal essay on film noir by French film critic Nino Frank, published in the August 28, 1946, issue of L’écran française (The French screen). In it Frank terms Double Indemnity an example of “a new type of crime film” coming out of Hollywood, which he designates as film noir. Frank thus coined the term and was the first critic to use it in print. He also singled out John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as a hard-boiled private eye, as significant in the development of film noir.33

  Both The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity feature a crafty, malevolent femme fatale, who uses men and then discards them. Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity are both prototypical femmes fatales; each is a heartless, double-dealing female. The femme fatale would become “one of the mainstays of classic noir,” writes Jason Holt—“fatal not only to the sap who falls for her, but also to herself.”34 That, in a nutshell, describes Phyllis Dietrichson.

  Nevertheless, Wilder said, “Although Double Indemnity has quite a reputation today as an example of film noir, I was not aware of being part of a trend at the time.” Indeed, Wilder never thought of any of his movies as belonging to the category of film noir when he made them. “I didn’t set out to make a particular style of film,” he declared. “You’re trying to make as good and as entertaining a picture as you possibly can. If you have any kind of style, the discerning ones will detect it.”35

  Y. Frank Freeman, vice president of Paramount, shared Charles Brackett’s opinion that Double Indemnity was a sordid movie. Freeman, who came to Paramount with experience in the soft drink industry, belonged to the religious Right. He hated the idea of Paramount’s making the film, but he was outvoted by other executives, including the head of production, B. G. “Buddy” De Sylva. Wilder disliked Freeman, and he was not alone. Indeed, the standing joke around the lot about the high-handed, narrow-minded mogul was for someone to ask, “Why Frank Freeman?”36

  At any rate, Freeman did not encourage any of his top actors to appear in Double Indemnity. So Wilder had trouble casting the leads—except for the role of the insurance claims investigator, Barton Keyes. Edward G. Robinson accepted the part because “at my age it was time to begin thinking of character roles, to slide into midd
le age. . . . I was never the handsome leading man; I could proceed with my career growing older in roles that would grow older, too.”37

  Wilder told me that every leading man in town turned down the role of the randy, womanizing murderer Walter Neff. “I confess that I even sank so low as to offer the role to George Raft,” the second-string star of mediocre melodramas like Background to Danger (1943). “And that’s pretty low!” Raft had an assistant read the screenplay for him, Wilder continued, “because he couldn’t read.” When Raft advised Wilder that he would take the part only on the condition that Neff turn out to be an FBI agent and arrest Phyllis at the end of the picture, Wilder replied that that was out of the question. “So George Raft turned down the role; and that’s when we knew we had a good picture.”38 (Raft was not noted to be a shrewd judge of roles; he also passed up the lead in The Maltese Falcon.)

  Wilder finally turned to Fred MacMurray, who hesitated to accept the part because he normally played “happy-go-lucky good guys” in light comedies. “You’re making the mistake of your life!” he exclaimed to Wilder. Playing a serious role required acting, he explained, “And I can’t do it.”39 Wilder responded that he was confident that MacMurray could play Neff and that he could guide him through the part. MacMurray had one other reservation about taking the part: he feared that Wilder’s wish to cast him against type as a cad and a scoundrel would ruin his screen image.40 But Wilder wanted MacMurray to play Walter precisely because Walter’s charming manner and affable grin belie the lust and larceny inside him, and MacMurray’s surface charm would make his performance all the more chilling as a result.

  Similarly, Barbara Stanwyck hesitated to accept the role of Phyllis Dietrichson, a woman so thoroughly malicious and unscrupulous. Stanwyck had been paired with MacMurray in the 1940 romantic comedy Remember the Night, which was written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, and she likewise wanted to maintain a positive image with her fans. But Stanwyck too relented because she trusted Wilder: “I knew him a little from Ball of Fire,” she explained. “You couldn’t help but notice how he cared about his script.”41

  Stanwyck’s portrayal of Phyllis won her a place in film history as a legendary femme fatale. Wilder gave Stanwyck a tacky blonde wig because he wanted it to project “the phoniness of the girl—bad taste, phony wig,” with cheap perfume to match.42 Wilder said that, after he made Double Indemnity, “MGM made another James M. Cain novel into a picture, The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946], with Lana Turner as the wife of the proprietor of a hot dog stand. She was made up to look glamorous instead of slightly tarnished the way we made up Barbara Stanwyck for Double Indemnity, and I think Postman was less authentic as a result.”

  The studio allocated a budget for Double Indemnity of $980,000, which Wilder adhered closely to. The budget allowed him a salary of $44,000 for the four months he spent writing the screenplay with Chandler and $26,000 for the two months he spent directing it. But his total take was still less than the $100,000 apiece that MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Robinson were paid for starring in the picture.

  Principal photography began on September 27, 1943. Wilder wanted to present an uncompromising picture of a corrupt, essentially lawless urban environment by shooting on location in the crooked streets and back alleys of Los Angeles. Schickel remarks, “Wilder’s judicious use of locations around Los Angeles is noteworthy; it is enough to take the film out of the studio context. Los Angeles was a city which was somewhat amoral; Wilder noticed that when he first came to town.”43 In the film, the gray atmosphere reflects the bleak lives of the characters, who live in run-down neighborhoods that have seen better days. Walter occupies a chintzy bachelor flat, and Phyllis lives with a husband who is nearly twice her age in a crumbling stucco bungalow. (The house used for exteriors is located at 6301 Quebec Street in the Hollywood Hills.) Wilder said, “I strove for a strong sense of realism in the settings in order to match the kind of story we were telling. I wanted to get away from what we described in those days as the white satin decor associated with MGM’s chief set designer, Cedric Gibbons [Ninotchka].”

  Hans Dreier, head of Paramount’s art department, had, like Wilder, started his career at Ufa in Berlin in the 1920s. He assigned Hal Pereira as production designer on Double Indemnity. Wilder instructed Pereira to design the interiors of the Dietrichson house to appear drab. Thanks to Pereira’s astutely placed venetian blinds, the faces of Walter and Phyllis, when they converse in the house, are at times barred with shadows that imply imprisonment of body or soul. Once the set was ready for shooting, Wilder said, “I would go around and overturn a few ashtrays in order to give the house in which Phyllis lived an appropriately grubby look, because Phyllis is a poor housekeeper—an index of her indifference to her husband.” Wilder got on well with Pereira, and they would work together again. Dreier, who supervised Pereira’s work, was likewise pleased with the results. Wilder continued, “I also worked with the cameraman, John Seitz, to put dust in the air, to give the house a sort of musty look. We blew aluminum particles into the air, and when they floated down into a shaft of sunlight, they looked just like dust.” (Real dust is invisible to the camera’s eye.) “It was just right for that creepy house in the Valley,” Wilder concluded. “I like that kind of realism.”

  Principal photography wrapped on November 24, 1943, just short of two months. When it came to postproduction, Miklos Rozsa contributed a portentous, dissonant score that establishes from the start an overall sense of dread and foreboding. It was not typical of the usual melodic Hollywood score, and Wilder soon discovered that Louis Lipstone disliked its discordant, morose themes even more than he had disapproved of Rozsa’s similar background music for Five Graves to Cairo. When Lipstone informed Wilder of his negative judgment of the Double Indemnity score, Wilder stared him down and barked, “You may be surprised to hear that I love it. Okay?”44 So Wilder overruled Lipstone again, and he was ultimately vindicated. Rozsa’s brooding score for Double Indemnity influenced the background music for subsequent noir films “like no other soundtrack of the 1940s,” writes Robert Horton. “The opening credits alone—a doom-laden thump of a funeral march,” all pounding chords and throbbing drum beats—“establishes the noir vibe with brazen audacity.”45

  The opening credits of the film show the silhouette of a man hobbling toward the camera on crutches; his shadow grows larger until it fills the screen. This menacing image prefigures Walter’s temporary impersonation of Phyllis’s crippled husband after Walter murders him.

  The film proper opens with a stunning sequence: A speeding car careens down a dark street late at night; a stoplight in the foreground of the shot changes from go to stop, but the auto runs the light. “This is, of course, a visual symbol for everything we are about to learn about the car’s occupant, Walter Neff,” says Schickel. Walter will “run all the stoplights in his relationship with Phyllis Dietrichson.”46

  Nursing a gunshot wound in his shoulder, Walter lurches into the building that houses the offices of the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company, where he is employed. He settles down at his desk, inserts a cylinder into the Dictaphone, and begins a memo to Barton Keyes, chief claims investigator for the insurance company. The memo takes the form of a confession, which Walter narrates, in voice-over on the sound track, while the story of his deadly alliance with Phyllis is portrayed in flashback. Wilder said that the secret of doing a voice-over in a movie was to “be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.”47 He followed this rule in the script for Double Indemnity; Walter’s caustic voice narration provides a running commentary on the events the viewers see unfolding on the screen.

  Since Walter is dictating an office memorandum, he supplies some vital statistics, starting with the date, July 16, 1938. Dating Neff’s memo, explains Peter Evans, “represents a common way at the time of avoiding reference to the war.”48 Walter identifies himself as “Walter Neff, insurance agent, thirty-five years old, unmarried.” He glances dow
n at the bullet wound in his shoulder and adds, “No visible scars, until a little while ago, that is.” Then, with a line lifted from a later scene in the book, Walter observes stoically that he killed Dietrichson: “I killed him for money and a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”49 Remarks such as this lend the film a fatalistic atmosphere, for the viewer knows that Walter is doomed from the start.

  With that, Walter begins to tell his tale. Wilder reminds the viewer that Walter is relating his own story by periodically returning to him sitting before the Dictaphone; each time Wilder does so, the bloodstain on Walter’s suit coat is larger. As Walter starts to narrate his story, he begins with lines once more taken directly from the novella. He says, “It all began last May. I remembered this policy renewal on Los Feliz Boulevard, so I drove over there,” to the home of the Dietrichsons.50

  When Walter sees Phyllis for the first time, she is standing on the staircase landing, looking down at him. She is draped in the white bath towel she has donned for sunbathing. Phyllis’s apparel suggests purity in color only, for, as the story unfolds, she will display her true colors. As she descends the stairs, Walter notices her gold ankle bracelet, which is shown in close-up. Evans writes, “The anklet dangles invitingly in front of him as she crosses her legs in the living room.” It is “an anklet which Walter relishes all the more for cutting into her flesh,” as Walter admits in his voice-over.51 Walter’s obsession with the anklet implies that it is for him a sexual fetish by which he is chained to Phyllis.

  Walter also notices the scent of Phyllis’s cheap perfume, which reminds him of the honeysuckle he smelled on the way to the Dietrichson house. He comments, in voice-over on the sound track, “It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” The cloying aroma that pervades the area is an emblem of “the rotten, sickly-sweet corruption” of Phyllis Dietrichson’s domain.52