And he does it with a truly masterful example of post-Citizen Kane studio filmmaking. Cinematographer and frequent Wilder collaborator John F. Seitz plays the expressionistic, low-key lighting that defines noir to the hilt, wrapping the illicit lovers in moody pitch-darkness, throwing silhouettes of Venetian blinds against the walls like prison bars, and making the shadow of MacMurray's Walter Neff loom over his actual body like a projection of his sin-blackened soul. Pure and simple, Double Indemnity just looks like a film noir, a true textbook example. It's a film that oozes attitude from its opening shot to its indelible close, and the way Wilder and Seitz use externalized visuals to illustrate their characters' warped internal psychology is sublime.
Also sublime is the work by the film's three principal actors: MacMurray, Stanwyck, and not least, Edward G. Robinson as the pursuing "doctor, bloodhound, cop, judge, jury, and father confessor all in one" claims agent Barton Keyes. Robinson's as great a character actor as ever, making up for what his part lacks in nuance with an energetic, wiseass performance that simultaneously sends up his star-making 1930s gangster roles and expands on them. MacMurray's solid too, his sleazy, cynical, fast-talking Neff a must-see for anyone who knows him only as The Absent-Minded Professor and the pipe-smoking patriarch on My Three Sons. But Stanwyck is the real show-stealer here: as the murderess Phyllis Dietrichson, she defines the term "femme fatale," alternating between "feminine" romantic and emotional displays of ambiguous authenticity and a kind of vacant inhumanity that's chilling to behold. Just the shot of her cold-blooded expression as Neff strangles her husband in the car seat beside her would be enough to make this an iconic performance. Add to that her first appearance, wearing nothing but a towel, an anklet and an infamously cheap blonde wig - about as sexy as you could get away with in the days of the Production Code - and is there any surprise that one of those other six Oscar nods went to Miss Stanwyck?
In all, however, Double Indemnity succeeds so utterly because it knows how to sell its theme. Like most films noir, Indemnity is about moral ambiguity, the blurring of the lines between those "good guys" and "bad guys" who had become grist for the typical crime film's mill. Unlike most noirs, though, these characters aren't corrupt cops or antiheroic robbers - they're just regular people, insurance salesmen and trophy wives. And while Wilder confessed a stylistic debt to the early thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock in the making of Double Indemnity, the difference between his approach and Hitch's is also vital: where the antagonizing forces in The Lady Vanishes or The 39 Steps came in the form of vaguely malevolent, seemingly omnipotent syndicates - a clear metaphor for Europe's wartime paranoia - in Double Indemnity the dangers come, hauntingly, from within ourselves. Granted, maybe it's a little far-fetched that a mere attraction for an anklet-wearing, half-naked Barbara Stanwyck, however fatal, could drive such an average man into a web of murder and deceit; but then again, this film was made at a time when an entire nation of "average people" allowed a horror like the Holocaust to happen.
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