Watched: December 23 2016

Director: Billy Wilder

Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

Year: 1944

Runtime: 1h 47min

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Oh, the dialogue! If you’re not interested in Film Noir, you should check this one out for the snappy dialogue alone. Old-timey flirting is the best flirting!

Insurance salesman Walter Neff (MacMurray), swings by a client’s house to renew his car insurance, but meets a Dame instead. The Dame is Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck), the client’s wife and winner of History’s Sexiest Name Award, and flirtatious banter ensues.

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Turns out the dame isn’t too fond of her husband after he lost his fortune, and she’s unusually interested in accident insurance for said husband. She invites Walter back when her husband is home, but changes the appointment to make sure the they’re alone. The two start plotting ways to get her husband the insurance without him knowing it and then making sure he has an accident to cash in on. A fatal one.

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Walter and Phyllis do the deed and make very sure it can’t be interpreted as anything but an accident as Walter works with insurance blood hound Barton Keyes (Robinson, of Little Caesar-fame) who is sure to investigate.

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Now, Phyllis might be a femme fatale (her past certainly seems to suggest so), but Walter is not by any means an innocent man driven to murder by the woman he loves. He tells the story and so we only get his side of it, but it is very clear that he is the mastermind behind the murder. He plans everything to the last detail and Phyllis operates on his orders. This does not mean that she is innocent, but either Walter is the driving force behind the whole thing, or his male ego won’t let him admit that Phyllis was smarter than him and so he makes it look as though he planned the crime. None of those options reflects very well on him.

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Double Indemnity is exciting and suspenseful, but the main reason we love it is easily the dialogue and banter! The first encounter between the main characters is amazing. We need to practice our old-timey flirting.

What we learned: sometimes murder smells like honeysuckle.

Next time: Murder, my Sweet (1944)