Thoughts on Double Indemnity.
Sep. 23rd, 2010 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19Last night, I kicked off my month-long film noir fest with a screening of Billy Wilder's 1944 classic, Double Indemnity. In addition to viewing the film, which I had never before seen (this time around, I'm going strictly for never-before-seens), I also watched a special about the film and its historical legacy.
There were a number of things that struck me as interesting in the program. First of all, I was surprised by the way that everyone seemed to feel that this film was the progenitor of the noir genre when John Huston's superlative The Maltese Falcon predates it by three years. Is Falcon, then, not a film noir? I find that somewhat hard to believe, frankly. However, as I went over in my mind the things that the film historians and specialists had said about Indemnity, it was clear that the film did indeed flaunt a quality that was original to it.
The Maltese Falcon, though a great noir (and easily my favorite, thus far), is about an exotic adventure. Now, granted, Humphrey Bogart's everyman Sam Spade does get caught up in it, but it is still heavily tinged with the exotic other. The falcon itself is an ancient relic of a far-flung foreign land, and it is brought to the wastes of San Francisco by a rag-tag team of eloquent, otherworldly odd-balls (Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Mary Astor).
By contrast, Double Indemnity takes place in the mundane world of Los Angeles and involves the sad and wholly unremarkable denizens of that city: a housewife, an oil worker, an insurance salesman. These are people with everyday nine-to-fives, with boring lives like you and I have. They do not have adventure fall into their laps, but instead seek it out themselves because the similitude of their very lives is suffocating. It's an intriguing difference in tone, to say the least.
But that notion of similitude and boredom brings me to another point that I found interesting. Much is made of the character of Phyllis Dietrichson, who was portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck, and her qualities as a femme fatale. In comparison with her, Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff is seen almost as a victim of her cunning plot. However, I simply cannot read him that way. At the end of the day, he is as bored with life as she is, and he sees in her an opportunity to test his boundaries and perhaps escape the confines of a life that he secretly hates. Stanwyck's vicious housewife is indeed a terrible figure, but her crimes are never really against the man she engages to help her in the plot to kill her husband. He knows the score, and he's in the heist for reasons of his own.
All in all, I liked Double Indemnity a hell of a lot. I'll have to see it again sometime once I've cycled through my store of film noirs to see if I truly consider it definitive. (And, of course, I'll need to re-engage Falcon again to determine if I think its sense of exoticism really acts as that much of a disqualifier when it comes to tracing the origins of the noir genre.)
There were a number of things that struck me as interesting in the program. First of all, I was surprised by the way that everyone seemed to feel that this film was the progenitor of the noir genre when John Huston's superlative The Maltese Falcon predates it by three years. Is Falcon, then, not a film noir? I find that somewhat hard to believe, frankly. However, as I went over in my mind the things that the film historians and specialists had said about Indemnity, it was clear that the film did indeed flaunt a quality that was original to it.
The Maltese Falcon, though a great noir (and easily my favorite, thus far), is about an exotic adventure. Now, granted, Humphrey Bogart's everyman Sam Spade does get caught up in it, but it is still heavily tinged with the exotic other. The falcon itself is an ancient relic of a far-flung foreign land, and it is brought to the wastes of San Francisco by a rag-tag team of eloquent, otherworldly odd-balls (Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Mary Astor).
By contrast, Double Indemnity takes place in the mundane world of Los Angeles and involves the sad and wholly unremarkable denizens of that city: a housewife, an oil worker, an insurance salesman. These are people with everyday nine-to-fives, with boring lives like you and I have. They do not have adventure fall into their laps, but instead seek it out themselves because the similitude of their very lives is suffocating. It's an intriguing difference in tone, to say the least.
But that notion of similitude and boredom brings me to another point that I found interesting. Much is made of the character of Phyllis Dietrichson, who was portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck, and her qualities as a femme fatale. In comparison with her, Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff is seen almost as a victim of her cunning plot. However, I simply cannot read him that way. At the end of the day, he is as bored with life as she is, and he sees in her an opportunity to test his boundaries and perhaps escape the confines of a life that he secretly hates. Stanwyck's vicious housewife is indeed a terrible figure, but her crimes are never really against the man she engages to help her in the plot to kill her husband. He knows the score, and he's in the heist for reasons of his own.
All in all, I liked Double Indemnity a hell of a lot. I'll have to see it again sometime once I've cycled through my store of film noirs to see if I truly consider it definitive. (And, of course, I'll need to re-engage Falcon again to determine if I think its sense of exoticism really acts as that much of a disqualifier when it comes to tracing the origins of the noir genre.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-24 05:18 am (UTC)Yeah, I gots the mad skilz. ;>
no subject
Date: 2010-09-24 12:54 pm (UTC)