No discussion of film noir is complete without Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity. Not because it was the first, although the assemblers of this year's two-disc "signature series" reissue try to make a case for that. Actually, the beginnings of the genre can be traced all the way back to John Huston's The Maltese Falcon in 1941, if not even earlier, to a brief mini-tradition of American B-films stemming roughly from the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But what does make Double Indemnity so historically significant — and what the talking heads on this DVD set do get right — is its placement as one of the first truly influential films noir, and certainly the most explicit execution of that style's essential narrative and visual elements to date.
Double Indemnity's release in 1944 puts it ahead of the crop of 1945 films that caused French critics to originally coin the phrase "film noir"; and its success, netting seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, paved the way for a new period of credibility in the genre, allowing for a brilliant, if short-lived, run of similarly-themed films in the post-war era.
The fact that it happens to be a fantastic movie doesn't hurt, either. Double Indemnity is perhaps the archetypal noir, not least because of its story - a product of not one, but two notable hardboiled fiction writers, with Raymond Chandler helping Wilder to adapt the script from a novella by James M. Cain. Chandler had written The Big Sleep, itself adapted into a classic noir by Howard Hawks in 1946; Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice was given the Hollywood treatment in 1946 as well, with Lana Turner in the starring role.
The talents of both authors are evident in Double Indemnity's sharply honed plot: an oil man's scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces a hardbitten insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray), convincing him to help murder her husband and collect on a fraudulent accident insurance claim, the "double indemnity" clause of which provides the film's title. It's a scenario one can virtually recite by heart, even without having seen the movie; not only can its themes of betrayal and adultery, lust, guilt and murder, be found as far back as Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, but Indemnity itself has been recycled and parodied ad nauseum in the 62 years since its release (most bizarrely in a subplot of 1993's Wayne's World 2 featuring Garth and a vampish Kim Basinger). Of all these tellings, however, Wilder's is still the best. Along with Chandler (and, of course, the source material of Cain's original story), he turns this simple plot into a tautly paced meditation on the potential for evil in the human heart.
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