DOUBLE INDEMNITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 294, 9 February 1945, Page 17

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

(Paramount)

NOBODY (except perhaps the producers) could be more agreeably surprised than I am that this film ran for an extended season in Welling-

ton, for it is certainly not designed for 13-year-olds, the mental age at which the average Hollywood film is directed. Movie audiences, as well as Hollywood itself, are showing signs of growing up when the one can make and the other can take such a film-and like it. Double Indemnity is adapted from the novel of that name by James M. Cain. Those who have read the original, or Cain’s other more famous story, The Postman Always Rings Twice, will know that Cain does not write stories for children, and they may not be expecting much of the full, rank, meaty flavour of Cain’s writing to have been transferred to the screen. It has been, thanks largely to the tough, intelligent direction of Billy Wilder, who treats the account of a sordid crime not as a conventional mystery melodrama with clues and cops scattered all over it, but as a study of the tensions and terrors in the mind of the murderer himself.

Picturegoers may also not be expecting to find Fred MacMurray as a killer, or Barbara Stanwyck as the femme fatale whose physical allure is as marked as her scruples are lacking. But they say that every comedian longs to play tragedy and every hero to be a villain. Robert Montgomery tried the experiment in Night Must Fall, and MacMurray does it here. He must have been risking his popularity with the fans who have come to accept him as a nice, dependable character, but he establishes himself as a first-class actor. He is particularly. good in those scenes which require him simply to keep quiet in the background while other characters, not yet suspecting him, piece together the crime he has committed. He is almost certain that it was a perfect crime, but he cannot be sure. Did he perhaps make a little mistake? Overlook one insignificant detail? In these scenes MacMur. ray’s pent-up quietness is more eloquent than words. Barbara Stanwyck’s reputation does not suffer, either, except in the story, by her portrayal of a woman who is the very reverse of the sympathetic characters she customarily portrays. As Phyllis Dietrichson she is evil personified; carnally corrupt and criminal from the top of her blonde curls to her painted toenails. By comparison, MacMurray even gains some sympathy from the audience; although he plans the murder and carries it out, he is really just the infatuated accomplice, she the guiding spirit. -Almost as striking a departure in characterisation is offered by Edward G. Robinson. Often cast as the hard-boiled criminal, he here appears on the side of the angels; as hard-boiled as ever, but this time devoting his skill and energy to fossicking out the flaws in bogus insurance claims. And what adds to the psychological tension of the picture is the affectionate friendship existing to the last between him and MacMurray. For MacMurray is an insurance salesman in

Robinson’s office who has been egged on by Phyllis Dietrichson to trick her husband into signing an insurance policy and then to murder him in such a way that the murder looks like a fall from a train-an obscure type of accident which involves the payment of double indemnity to the widow. Not nice people, and not exactly a savoury story, but a fascinating and expert piece of film-making.