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The Rule-Breaking Maestro Behind Noir’s Trademark Sound
By Tim Greiving
The Criterion Collection
To take full account of Billy Wilder’s legacy is to wrestle with a series of contradictions. He was a refugee in the United States—an Austrian who had escaped Germany with the rise of the Nazi Party, which eventually decimated his family—who became one of the most perceptive and forthright chroniclers of the tangled dynamics of American life. A master of sardonic, even venomous wit refracted through noir and dark dramas, he was also the sensibility behind what might be the best comedy in cinema history, 1959’s effervescent Some Like It Hot. His work has been called misogynistic, yet characters such as Marilyn Monroe’s tender Sugar in Some Like It Hot and Gloria Swanson’s mad, yearning Norma Desmond, in the 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, challenge such critiques.
Even with all this complexity, critics have too often understood Wilder rather narrowly. Andrew Sarris, the totemic Village Voice critic, placed Wilder in the “Less Than Meets the Eye” section of his 1968 survey of auteurism The American Cinema, alongside other such powerhouses as John Huston, Elia Kazan, David Lean, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz—as opposed to the directors he elevated for their distinctive style and the supposedly clear artistic through lines of their careers, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Fritz Lang among them. Most damningly, Sarris wrote, “Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism.” Sarris would in later years backtrack on this stark judgment, but once in the ether, such criticisms take on a life of their own.
In fact, the charge of cynicism has dogged Wilder from his early years in Hollywood as a screenwriter in the 1930s and early 1940s, despite output such as the delightful Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper screwball comedy Ball of Fire, directed by Howard Hawks. This is likely due to the piercing nature of Wilder’s humor, which allows his characters to exist in gray areas instead of being neat and infallible heroes. Even so, I don’t think cynicism is what Wilder was tapping into. It is, rather, a stunning honesty, about human nature and about the roiling unease underlying the so-called American dream. With his gimlet eye peering at his characters and their behaviors and motivations, his films expose, even if inadvertently, the gendered, classed, and racialized fissures in American culture. This can be seen throughout his work—the 1951 Ace in the Hole, where Kirk Douglas’s conniving journalist is willing to manipulate the lives of others for a good story and the masses eat it up, is perhaps the most virulent—but the film in which Wilder delves into ingrained American notions of desire and power most potently is the blistering 1944 noir Double Indemnity.
Film noir, growing out of the thirties gangster-film and earlier German expressionist traditions, has always lent itself to this kind of stark honesty and countercultural potential. So it’s not surprising that, when Wilder brought what he had to the genre, the result was a work of stunning power. Double Indemnity is the Platonic ideal of the classic film noir. A man weakened by lust is willing to murder for a woman he doesn’t realize is smarter and more dangerous than he is. In this case, the players are the insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray, proving he’s at his best playing a cad) and the married Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck). She wants her cold, controlling husband dead, so that she can be free of him and her saccharine stepdaughter, Lola (Jean Heather), and reap his accident-insurance money. Walter makes the plan, under the nose of his spark plug of a boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), with whom he is exceedingly close. But once Walter and Phyllis kill her husband, their fraught lust quickly reveals itself to be doomed. The film is near perfect, and it is a testament to the art of collaboration. Perceptive editing by Doane Harrison; Miklós Rózsa’s swelling score; the piercingly rhythmic, hard-edged dialogue by novelist Raymond Chandler, who cowrote the screenplay; the perfectly cast actors playing off one another in ways that reveal both their artistry and the power of noir archetypes; the precision of Edith Head’s costuming; John F. Seitz’s cinematography that plunges the leads deeper and deeper into a darkness from which they can’t escape—all work together to create an endlessly entertaining picture, and one that would shape the genre not just in terms of style and story but with its sharp vision of the seen and unseen forces of American life.
There’s a reason Double Indemnity has endured for nearly eighty years. It is achingly complex in its relationship to the thematic fuel that powers noir—alienation, masculinity, desire, and the dreams and fears of white America. The depiction of Phyllis is especially shrewd, challenging ideas about femininity—and once again the charge of misogyny against Wilder—with its understanding of what might push a woman toward violence in order to experience the freedom men take for granted. Stanwyck’s marriage of the technical and the emotional crafts a femme fatale against whom all others are measured. She’s intelligent, conniving, and driven fiercely by her own unique desires. It’s a tricksy portrait that isn’t easy to sum up with the neat phrases that have come to dominate our understanding of images of women in film, such as “the male gaze” and “empowerment.” Stanwyck defies these terms through a cunning physicality and a keen insight into Phyllis’s knotted interior life.
The femme fatale is the most seductive figure in noir, and not just for her obvious lustful overtures but because she shimmers with possibility—the possibility of outsmarting society’s strictures. Phyllis is icy, manipulative, cunning. The femme fatale has often been framed as purely the patriarchy’s nightmare, a reaction to the social shifts in post–World War II American society. But I like to think about how women at the time may have understood her, as perhaps offering a different road map for life, free from domestic constraints. Sure, in classic noir she was more often than not punished, or even killed, for daring to step beyond the guidelines of polite society. But that’s what makes her magnetic. She’s the B-girl with a run in her stocking and cherry-red lips. She’s the woman conning her way into freedom and money and the kind of power that is often out of the grasp of working-class women. She’s a haughty, rich serial killer. She’s a yearning young woman using her wiles to feel something, anything. She’s an aging star whose power hasn’t faded though Hollywood’s interest in her has. She’s Hecate with all her dynamism and prowess. She’s Lilith refusing to lie under Adam. She’s anyone you pass on the street, in your office, in a cramped diner or a sweaty nightclub, in high-rise apartments in make-believe cities like Gotham, where a black cat unfurls itself at her feet. Most acutely, the femme fatale is an emblem of whiteness that has fallen from its perch of power into the morass and complications of a racialized darkness that speaks as much to the fear of women in control of their own destinies as it does to a fear specifically of the kind of wanton sexuality and boundary breaking that white America associates with women of color, particularly Black women. So when, in the closing moments of her arc, Phyllis is drenched in darkness, transforming the living room where she first met Walter, it’s evident that this darkness isn’t just a physical reality but a spiritual one. It’s a darkness that marks her as other.
Double Indemnity may not immediately seem like the type of film that has much to say about race. But the filmic language of Hollywood cinema is deeply interwoven with the racial attitudes of the culture it sought or seeks to entertain. Noir is all about transgression. And what could be more transgressive, more of a fall from grace, more of a weakness in the white imagination, than to be associated with Blackness? Whether or not Wilder was wholly conscious of this aspect of the film, his vision acted as an important model for how the genre came to be conceived and went on to develop. Consider for a moment a crucial scene in the 1947 picture Out of the Past—another iconic noir by a revelatory and deeply entertaining director, Jacques Tourneur—in which Robert Mitchum’s investigator descends into an all-Black nightclub to speak to someone who can help him in his task to find a missing woman. There’s an ease to Mitchum’s physicality that suggests he has been in such spaces before. In this way, the film marks him as someone out of step with polite and white society, a man willing to dip into the margins. Classic noir is resplendent with such scenes that mark—whether visually or thematically—its white characters with suggestions of Blackness. As Michael B. Gillespie writes in his wide-ranging masterwork Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, “Issues of narrative authority, racialization, and power deeply inform noir beyond its aesthetic profile as a high-contrast play of light and shadow.” And the Black-crafted and Black-fronted noirs that would come decades later—films such as Deep Cover (1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)—finally bring to the forefront the ideas about race that are nestled in the margins of classic noirs.
Of course, the sophistication of Double Indemnity cannot be attributed solely to Wilder. We have Stanwyck’s fearsome understanding and rigor in her role. And arguably as important is the influence of Chandler—creator of the iconic noir character Philip Marlowe—who, with Wilder, adapted the James M. Cain novel of the same name. There was no love lost between Wilder and Chandler. Their first and only collaboration proved to be explosive, but together they were able to refine and enliven the source text—particularly in the case of Phyllis, who comes across as a villain operating in a single register in Cain’s novel. In the book, Phyllis is introduced through Walter’s narration thusly: “A sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look.” A few pages later, Walter gets to the point of his attraction to her: “I wasn’t the only one that knew about that shape. She knew about it herself, plenty.” In the film, her introduction plays out far more deliciously, allowing Phyllis to be an active participant in and controller of the situation instead of just an object conceived through Walter’s eyes.
It’s a hot, sunny day in Los Angeles. One of the few daytime scenes in the film. Walter connives his way into the Dietrichson home past the objections of the housekeeper, in hopes of catching Mr. Dietrichson, whose car-insurance policy has lapsed. Once he enters the home, it’s as if sunlight is barred, starting the film’s descent into an intense claustrophobia. It is free of the faux-charming Americana of the scene of young white kids playing baseball outside. But Walter isn’t feeling the noose around his neck quite yet. Instead, something far different from fear has been sparked: lust.
“This is the barbed animus that powers noir: an alienation from the might, security, and sterile cruelty of white society.”
As Walter needles the maid, Phyllis approaches from above, coming to stand on the second-floor landing wearing only a towel. Her voice is abrupt until she gets a better look at Walter. “Is there anything I can do?” she then purrs, her hair aglow as if it’s radioactive. All that stands between them is that towel, a staircase, and the promise of murder yet to come. Phyllis goes to put herself together while the maid informs Walter that the family keeps the liquor locked up in the living room as she leads him there. “It’s all right, I always carry my own keys,” he quips. Such a crass statement makes clear that while Walter may look like he belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting, there’s an edge to him that existed before he walked through the Dietrichson door.
As Walter makes his pitch—as much for her as for renewing the insurance policy—Phyllis paces, eyes narrowed and directed at the floor. She rotates a lighter in her hands. The moment she looks up at him and asks, as cool as mercury, “You’re a smart insurance man, aren’t you, Mr. Neff?” it is evident that she has been working up a plan of her own. Walter is more interested in her “honey of an anklet” and what’s engraved on it. Her name. Their conversation becomes an undeniably sadomasochistic flirting session marked by the viciousness and intensity both Wilder and Chandler were known for.
“There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour,” Phyllis says with a luxurious venom in her voice. “How fast was I going, officer?” Walter asks as a caddish grin smears itself across his face. “I’d say around ninety.” She looks over his shoulder for a second before their repartee continues, eventually ending with Walter towering over her, edging himself closer. But it’s obvious that she’s the one in control of the narrative and the camera’s gaze. “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” he wonders. “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder,” she claps back. She has emasculated him. She has outsmarted him. And he’s utterly in love with every moment of it.
The next time they meet, Walter catches Phyllis’s intent to kill her husband. But the “hook was too strong” for him to escape. Phyllis has often been seen as a wildly immoral, irredeemable woman. But this image is complicated by her assertion that her husband not only drinks too much but sometimes beats her. Is Phyllis merely a black widow, killing the first Mrs. Dietrichson, whom she cared for as a nurse, and then the man she took as her own? Or is she a woman abused and boxed in by society’s expectations of womanhood? Why can’t she be both? The character glimmers with such contradictions.
Stanwyck is harder to pin down than other classic Hollywood dynamite divas, such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. She doesn’t lend herself to parody because of her hyperspecificity, grace, and refusal to paint her emotions wholly in vivid, larger-than-life strokes. She works best in quiet moments, when her body and eyes do the talking. This is evident in Double Indemnity’s arguably most famous (and written-about) scene: the murder. Around the halfway point of the film, in a shot much briefer than its impact would lead you to believe, as Walter strangles the previously unsuspecting Mr. Dietrichson from the back seat, Wilder and Seitz focus intensely on Stanwyck’s face. Cast in deep shadow, her eyes trained on some distant horizon as if staring through and beyond the souls of the audience, she barely moves. But her eyes glimmer with a possibility and quenched lust that is unmistakable. It’s a canny way around the Production Code. But it’s also more impactful to hear what’s happening while watching the reaction play out on Phyllis’s face. It’s the finest work Stanwyck does in the film, bringing to the surface the lust and desire brewing within her for the life she feels she deserves to live. Here, the mask slips.
The femme fatale is often juxtaposed with her photonegative: the
angelic, virginal woman in need of being protected or rescued. In Double
Indemnity, this is the young Lola. Her perky, yearning voice and doe
eyes situate her in a pantheon of filmic femininity. She’s not a person
but a device crafted to burnish Walter’s guilt and lead him to betray
Phyllis in order to save whatever is left of his own ragged soul. But
what’s most important is how the lighting situates the two women along a
continuum of femininity that noir considers and reconsiders—a continuum
marked by racialized expectations. In Black Mirror: The Cultural
Contradictions of American Racism, Eric Lott writes, “Hollywood lighting
conventions demonstrate this multiplex drama of transgression,” and
cites Richard Dyer—from his revelatory book White—as suggesting that
“the lighting of white big-screen icons (such as Lillian Gish) has given
their ethical purity a racially particular form, most especially in
black-and-white film. Associations of worth and whiteness are by now so
naturalized as to pass beneath conscious notice, and Hollywood has
always exploited them.” Noir and its descendants make this manifest.
Just consider how Lola seems to be casting her own light. She’s almost
incandescent, as opposed to Phyllis’s descent into darkness. But it is
Walter’s arc that forces into focus the dynamics of race and fear of
Blackness that infuse noir.
Black characters figure into the story in minuscule ways in terms of screen time. But they are crucial to our understanding of Walter’s border crossing, from upstanding, obedient, stoic emblem of white society to a man consumed by darkness, visually, morally, and racially tinged. Various Black characters act as alibis for Walter: the attendant in the garage of his building to whom Walter pointedly mentions that he has been in his apartment all night; the porters on the train where he impersonates the late Mr. Dietrichson. This, along with Walter taking Lola to a Mexican restaurant in an effort to keep her suspicions about Phyllis quiet, and his thinly coded animosity toward anyone who isn’t Anglo-Saxon American, such as Lola’s boyfriend, Nino, paint a picture of the American fear of the other. This is the barbed animus that powers noir: an alienation from the might, security, and sterile cruelty of white society while placing actual Black characters in crucial narrative aspects at the margins to further tie its white main characters to the suggestion of the racialized other.
Double Indemnity wouldn’t glint with half its complexity if Wilder and Chandler, or the studio, had insisted on following Cain’s ending. In the book, Phyllis has Walter shot, and after he makes it to a hospital, he confesses to the murder of her husband in order to clear Lola, with whom he has fallen in love. In exchange for his confession, Phyllis and Walter are allowed to get on a ship, separately, bound for Mexico; when they meet each other on board, they commit to a suicide pact that causes the more intriguing aspects of the story to unravel. Blessedly, in the film, the dynamic between Lola and Walter hinges more on his growing guilt than any romanticism. The film’s ending works so much better because it allows for ambiguity, complication, and a murkier rendition of the forces involved in shaping the fates of these characters. Cain’s ending is like a cudgel, aimed particularly at women. Chandler and Wilder are far less simplistic in their characterizations, and they reshape the ending to further highlight and interrogate the differences between Walter’s loving relationship with Keyes and his passion for Phyllis.
The film operates marvelously and incisively on multiple levels. It’s a crystalline noir script marked by narrative symmetry. It’s a bruising view of the dynamics between straight men and women, particularly when lust comes into the equation. It reveals a remarkable understanding of the male fear of female desire. It’s a testament to Stanwyck’s skill as an actor, with her feminist-tinged understanding of the internal emotional lives of women. And like all the best noir, it is a warped mirror held up to the imagination of a white America that refuses to wake up from its dreams of itself.
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