The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great
film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four
selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon),
Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We
shall explore the lives and work of these directors. In this post LR Simon
discusses The Double Indemnity (1944).
James M. Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity centers on a
murder plot by a woman (Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck) and an
insurance agent (Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray) with whom she has an
extramarital affair. They meet when Neff makes a house call for a routine
renewal of an automobile insurance policy. Dietrichson asks him how she could
take out an insurance policy on her husband without his knowledge; he realizes
she’s plotting murder and wants nothing to do with it. She shows up at his
apartment and persuades him to help her. He goes along with the plot, beginning
with getting Mr. Dietrichson to sign an insurance policy that includes a double
indemnity clause that doubles the insurance payout for accidental death.
The complicated plot is handled deftly by co-writers Billy
Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Wilder and Chandler had a prickly relationship
during the writing of the screenplay. Chandler had assumed that he would write
the screenplay alone, and asked for a sample script for use as a formatting
reference. Wilder thought the result was largely unusable with the exception of
some lines of dialogue, and explained that they would have to work together.
Wilder considered the collaboration to be helpful and that “[w]hat we were doing together had real electricity”. He considered Chandler a great writer, but not a great
screenwriter. Chandler’s view of Wilder was considerably less charitable.
Double Indemnity drew great interest from several studios
shortly after its publication, but when Joseph Breen of the Hays Office sent a
message to the studios that the nature of the characters and plot would render
the story unfilmable, all offers on the story were withdrawn. Of concern to the
Hays Office were plot elements dealing with adultery, depicting the method of
committing a murder, and the original ending, which involved the two main
characters committing suicide. When Wilder took on the task of adapting the
story to film, he altered the story to have Neff sent to the gas chamber for
murdering Dietrichson and conspiring with her to murder her husband. The Hays
Office considered the gas chamber scene too gruesome to pass muster with the
local censorship boards; Wilder realized, however, that the film really ended
at the familiar scene at the elevator, with Neff dying in colleague and mentor
Barton Keyes’ (Edward G. Robinson) arms.
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