Tagline: It’s love and murder at first sight!
Double Indemnity movie storyline. In 1938, Walter Neff, an experienced salesman of the Pacific All Risk Insurance Co., meets the seductive wife of one of his clients, Phyllis Dietrichson, and they have an affair. Phyllis proposes to kill her husband to receive the proceeds of an accident insurance policy and Walter devises a scheme to receive twice the amount based on a double indemnity clause. When Mr. Dietrichson is found dead on a train track, the police accept the determination of accidental death. However, the insurance analyst and Walter’s best friend Barton Keyes does not buy the story and suspects that Phyllis has murdered her husband with the help of another man.
Double Indemnity (1944) is director Billy Wilder’s classic film noir masterpiece – a cynical, witty, and sleazy thriller about adultery, corruption and murder. The urgently-told, highly-stylized story was Wilder’s third film after The Major and the Minor (1942) and Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Wilder effectively used locales in the greater Los Angeles area: the Glendale train station, the Hollywood Bowl, ‘Jerry’s Market,’ a night-time downtown office building, a Spanish-style house on Quebec St., the protagonist’s apartment at the Chateau Marmont, etc.
The material for Double Indemnity was derived from ‘hard-boiled’ James M. Cain’s 1943 melodramatic novella Three of a Kind that first appeared in 1935 in abridged, 8-part serial form in Liberty Magazine. It was adapted for the screen by director Billy Wilder and detective novelist Raymond Chandler (who was best known for his character Philip Marlowe, played by Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944), Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), and Robert Montgomery in Lady in the Lake (1946), among others).
[Cain’s first infamous novel was a 1934 best-seller that was also staged in 1936 and made into a film in both 1946 and 1981 – Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942, It.) was an unauthorized version of Cain’s work – the first of the three. Another of Cain’s 1941 novels was also made into a popular film noir with Joan Crawford – Mildred Pierce (1945).]
Double Indemnity (1944)
Directed by: Billy Wilder
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers, Byron Barr, Richard Gaines, Fortunio Bonanova, John Philliber, Bess Flowers, Teala Loring
Screenplay by: Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler
Production Design by: David S. Hall
Cinematography by: John F. Seitz
Costume Design by: Edith Head
Set Decoration by: Bertram C. Granger
Art Direction by: Hans Dreier, Hal Pereira, David S. Hall
Music by: Miklós Rózsa
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: July 3, 1944
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