It’s a week of Noir at Mid Century Cinema—I’m teaching a class on the subject at Cornell’s Adult University. Today we visited the bookends of the classic period: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), before diving into a close reading of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), one of the greatest films ever made. With source material from James M. Cain, written by Wilder with Raymond Chandler, and shot in gorgeous, inky blacks by cinematographer John Seitz (who also collaborated with Wilder on Sunset Blvd. among other films, and also shot the noir classics This Gun for Hire and The Big Clock), it easily lives up to its pedigree and remains one of the noirs that set the mold.
Indemnity’s opening voice-over-in-ruins (“I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman”), dissolving into a façade of idealized Americana (children playing baseball—what darkness lurks in the house just behind them?), sets the story down a narrative track from which we know the characters will be unable to escape. Double Indemnity has much to say about capitalism, but at its heart is a very old-fashioned story—a love triangle at the center of which is an insurance salesman (Fred McMurray) caught between the mother of all femmes fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) and his boss (Edward G. Robinson). Ultimately, McMurray kills one and breaks the heart of the other (my own view is that the relationship between the men is, even in code, platonic, but that does not diminish the intimacy of their bond). If you haven’t seen it, it’s (yet another) of those race-out-right-now and get to it. (To quote Woody Allen: “Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, of course, is a masterpiece.”)
This will be a week full of masterpieces, and, if you want to follow along, next up is The Big Sleep, followed by Gilda, Out of the Past, Le Doulos, and Chinatown. But don’t forget about The Maltese Falcon—we’ll be getting back to that one, as its influence casts a shadow (sorry about that) across all the noirs, and especially the neo-noirs, that would follow (spoiler alert—look for Falcon to resurface Friday afternoon). And if you want to catch up on the basics of noir – the look, the feel, and the politics (in short: darkness, disorientation and despair) – there are a good number of terrific books out there, but an excellent starting point, and very highly recommended, is More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, by James Naremore.
Double Indemnity: MacMurray in the Middle
Double Indemnity: Confession
Double Indemnity: Two Scorpions in the Dark
Double Indemnity: “Closer than that, Walter”