"Criminal love"

Title: Double Indemnity
Year: 1944
Genre: Crime, Film-Noir, Thriller
Director: Billy Wilder
Writer: Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler (writen by), James M. Cain (based on his novel)
Runtime: 107min
Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers
Produc.: Paramount Pictures
Budget: $927.262 thousand dollars approx.

In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an insurance salesman who comes across Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) when he was going by his house to see her husband, a customer of his. Soon the two begin a romance, while coming together to kill Mr. Dietrichson, make it look like an accident (Tom Powers) and keep the policy money. 

Occasionally I like to resort to the old cinema. I think that while the new Hollywood has plenty to offer, the classical period also had its own and still has it. There are stories that simply do not suffer the passing of the years, and Billy Wilder´s Double Indemnity is one of them. 

Wilder directed here a plot that starts with the end and is then told by the way of a giant flashback. But before jumping to the beginning, the responsible himself, sitting behind a desk, is already revealing us (confessing it to a recorder) how the matter ended. This is a scenario we do not know anything about, except that this man is a murderer. As the film progresses the image of Walter and the recorder will be included, from time to time, in this very short lapses, but that immediately retake the past. 

Interestingly, the first classic movie I remember seeing belonged to the same director´s filmography, on that occasion Sunset Blvd. (1950), somewhat later. It also stemmed from a crime, and also, one of the involved in it was in charge of telling us what had happened. Except that this time, the link between narrator and transgression was somewhat different. 

Thus in one and in the other, Wilder has been able to demonstrate proficiency in the narrative art, doing something that at first might sound obvious, but in reality it is not at all. Not everyone has the ability to intelligently describe the events that lead to a murder, with the audience already half-aware of the end, and that despite that, one still wants to keep watching. 

Double Indemnity parts from the plan that Phyllis and Walter built and then implement, with the illusion (¿naive, perhaps?) of committing the perfect crime. What happens is that an act of this nature involves many factors, but above all to be clear on how the assassination is wanted, in what place and in what circumstances, to come out fully clean. Walter is shown as a guy who is meticulous and who has all the chances to win, having as an ally a woman who loves him, listens to him and obeys without asking and confidently. This appears to be a real estate opportunity, with the exception that Walter is a seller, easy of words, and not an experienced criminal. It would be enough to have one single miscalculation so that everything planned goes off the deep end. 

In this foray of Wilder´s into the crime/film-noir genre, the director works with the fact that, even from outside the movie, the viewer is in the end, the only absolute witness. In addition, alongside the makers themselves, one is also witnessing the whole process of research, attending to how the executives of Pacific All Risk Insurance strive to discover what we already know. 

My rating: 6/10

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