Tuesday 11 May 2010

Double Indemnity (1944)

That was all there was to it. Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked. There was nothing to give us away. And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly, it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy Keyes, but it’s true, so help me, I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.

Double Indemnity (1944) Dir: Billy Wilder

I reckon this possibly my favourite Noir movie. Barbara Stanwyck is perhaps the definitive Fatale; she plays an arch manipulator, so skilful in her estimations of the men in her life that she has to do (or say) very little - she just lets them spin like tops around her until they all fall down.

The screenplay was by Raymond Chandler, adapting the James M. Cain novel. Chandler wasn’t a fan of Cain; although the plot remains pretty much the same, the dialogue is clearly Chandler’s work - especially the exchanges between Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, who plays the central role of a lovestruck cynic so well.
The movie starts at the end, which I always enjoy - here, MacMurray narrates what happened into a primitive dictaphone. This foreshadows events, so we know from the outset it won’t have a happy ending. The power of the story is what happens in between.

A (relatively) more recent example of this narrative technique is DePalma’s Carlito’s Way, where a bleeding-to-death Carlito (Al Pacino) wearily dreams of a tropical retreat he’ll never get to see (his flagging eyes see it on a travel poster instead) and works his story back from there.

No comments:

Post a Comment