Double Indemnity: A Genre Common Ancestor
By Bill Rockas, Edited by Carson Lutz
As a categorization tool mainly used for marketing purposes, genre seldom encapsulates what a film can offer. However, in the case of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, genre history is imperative to understanding the lasting impact of the film. Double Indemnity is one of the foundational pillars of the film noir genre, a term originally applied by French critic Nino Frank to American thriller or detective films in the period 1944-54, generally characterized by dark lighting, a crime, and a moral lesson (“Film Noir - Everything You Need to Know”). When Double Indemnity was released, Paramount described the adult drama as a thriller/horror movie. It wasn’t a mystery, and it wasn’t a monster movie — like the Universal Monsters or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene 1920) — but it was thrilling, adult, and employed a familiar, yet decidedly dark, atmosphere. With its tense nature, subject matter, and suspenseful tone, the film landed firmly in the thriller/horror category of the Hollywood landscape in 1944 (“Thrills and Chills” 163-164).
However, the film’s true significance lies in its pioneering qualities. Double Indemnity had far-reaching effects, weakening the grip of the Production Code, a private agreement between the major studios to not create or exhibit films without the approval of the Production Code Office of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) — an organization funded by major studios to self-censor films and avoid government censorship (Bissen 42). Even more broadly, the film matured the art form beyond the thriller/chiller to the more sophisticated and adult film noir. The use of a real story that had been sensationalized and molded to fit familiar narratives is a style of storytelling that has only grown over the last eighty years into the class of stories today known as true crime, a genre marked by stories involving real life crime (usually murder) and a morality tale. Featuring the horrific schemes of monstrous characters, the true crime tradition often subtly harkens back to Wilder’s 1944 picture, both in form and content.
The preconceived story categories for films were radically different in the 1940s than they are today. While romances, musicals, and comedies were distinct classifications, Mark Jankovich notes that there was a group of films “described as thrillers on the grounds that they provided ‘thrills and chills,’ and hence the term ‘thriller’ was often indistinguishable from that of the ‘chiller.’” He elaborates, the thriller was a film that “provoked the kinds of physical reactions usually associated with horror today” (“Thrills and Chills” 158). Double Indemnity inhabited this category in 1944, as realist crime drama remained unfamiliar territory in cinematic entertainment.
The New York Times review of Double Indemnity from September 7, 1944, associated the film with the horror genre and stated that it was “designed to freeze the marrow in an audience’s bones.” From the newspaper’s perspective, the film had “a realism reminiscent of the bite of past French films” (Crowther). Likewise, the Courier Journal Louisville Kentucky’s August 1944 review of the film described the picture as “adult” and “suspenseful” (Martin). The “realism” of Double Indemnity marked a transformation in the Code era of cinema. As the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune stated in its July 9, 1944 review, “‘Double Indemnity’ is a grim and hard-boiled crime picture, acquiring an immense degree of realism in discarding most of the devices and dodges which customarily adorn this sort of thing” (Murphy). This brand of realism (i.e. expression of a true crime story instead of a fantasy) not only advanced a new approach to cinematic storytelling, but also reflected the quickly changing times.
The literary genre of hard-boiled detective fiction had been in existence since the 1920s. Indeed, both James M. Cain, the author of the novella that inspired Double Indemnity, as well as Wilder’s co-writer for the script, Raymond Chandler, were both well-known “hard-boiled” authors. (Biesen 45). Though they had established careers, their explicit content was only permitted in literature. When the MPPDA Film Production Code Office was instituted in 1934, films with adult subjects, such as murder and sex, were almost impossible to make. The Production Code aimed to avoid government censorship by imposing industry-wide standards and rules designed to protect the morals and impressionable nature of women, children, and other vulnerable minds. Films were required to demonstrate moral standards, including respect for the law, the sanctity of the family, and the Christian faith. While a limited amount of taboo suggestion was allowed, the Code required that traditional values must always triumph in the protagonists’ thoughts and actions. (Shurlock 142). Given the sanitized nature of films during this era, bringing a film based upon a real murder and a racy, hard-boiled crime novella to the screen was thought impossible — but the times were changing, and a new genre was about to emerge.
Double Indemnity was filmed in September 1943, during World War II. While the newsreels told the all-too-real story of the world in an all-consuming conflict, the films being produced were largely escapist fantasies. There was a disconnect between the silver screen’s fantasy lives and the stories that reflected people as they were truly living. As James Cain put it, “The public is fed up with the old-fashioned melodramatic type of hokum” (Beisen 45). Wilder’s career is defined by experimenting with dark subject matter, so it could be reasoned that he shared this discontent, interesting him in Cain’s work.
Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity was based upon the 1927 murder of Albert Snyder by his wife Ruth and her lover, Judd Grey. Snyder was killed for his double indemnity insurance policy money. The story had been a tabloid sensation and was heavily covered by the scandal papers of the day. The reporting was theatrical, even molded to fit a tight narrative model: There was a love triangle, conflict, and low-life characters who would commit the most heinous crime for sex and money (Pelizzon 213). Cain, who had worked at one of the New York tabloids at the time of the Snyder-Grey case, created a fictional version of the story, elevating it from low-brow tabloid pablum to a middle-brow story of a femme fatale who duped a gullible man into killing her husband, allowing her to collect the insurance money. Cain sold the novella to Liberty magazine in 1936 for serialization (Pelizzon 231). Producing such a sensation, the story was purchased by MGM in 1935 and submitted to the Production Code Office for approval. The story was swiftly rejected by the Production Code Office as it included murder, adultery, violence, a miscarriage of justice — and in the original story, a double suicide (Biesen 42; Phillips 54). Any one of these elements would have been objectionable, but to set them all in concert was simply unthinkable. But writer/director Billy Wilder, a master of skirting the Production Code, envisioned a way to revise the story and get it to the screen. In 1943, he submitted a partial story and outline to the Production Code Office for approval. Wilder made significant changes in the story, including ditching the double suicide and clearly punishing the evildoers by the film’s conclusion (Biesen 48). This time around, the Production Office approved the idea, perhaps because the head of the Production Code Office, Joseph Breen, had recently worked a short stint as the general manager of RKO. Working for the business side of the film industry softened his views on stories with touches of adultery (Phillips 54). Wilder’s astute manipulation of the Production Code was essential to retaining the “pattern of the notorious Snyder-Judd Gray affair” (Goldberg), while also finding a way to tell a story of sex, money, and murder.
Wilder’s brilliance shone in his ability to keep the story highly mature. The film kept its adulterous sexual relationship and murder for money, but rather than show or state those things directly, Wilder employed a strategy of maximizing innuendo and letting the audience fill in the blanks, a technique he adopted from his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch (Biesen 46-48; Biltereyest 2711). The risqué elements would be implied with metaphor, but not so obtusely that adult audiences would not get the message. For the New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther, this concept was difficult to understand. He noted in his review of Double Indemnity that it was hard to believe that Neff (Fred MacMurray) would be hopelessly smitten just after a brief glance at Phyllis’s (Barbara Stanwyck’s) ankles. The pair’s repartee conveys their sexual chemistry as playful and dangerous. Phyllis toys with Neff. We understand that she sees him as a potential co-conspirator. He is an insider who knows what technical mistakes to avoid and she can control him through her feminine wiles. It is plain that her motivation is not lust or love, but money, and his motivation is sex, even if the audience only sees and hears about her ankles. In a later scene, Phyllis is in Neff’s apartment. The audience sees them kiss, but nothing more. It is later suggested that the pair were having sex, as Neff is relaxing on the couch enjoying a cigarette and Phyllis is reapplying her lipstick. The two characters are engaged in postcoital behavior, but the parties are fully dressed and not even touching. Wilder mastered the art of innuendo while staying within the literal rules of the Production Code, telling a steamy and salacious story to the sheltered audiences of the 1940s.
The critics of the time did not universally find Wilder’s artful dodge entirely successful. The esteemed critic James Agee wrote in his October 14, 1944 review for The Nation that “the picture never fully takes hold of its opportunities, such as they are, perhaps because those opportunities are appreciated chiefly as surfaces and atmospheres and as very tellable trash.” Crowther argued that “the very toughness of the picture is also the weakness of its core, and the academic nature of its plotting limits its general appeal.” The film was something new: adult realistic subject matter, settings for evil trysts as mundane as a grocery store, and suggestions rather than a spoon-fed story. The film presented a new type of monster — not an angry irrational beast, but an ice-cold blonde who kills not for money, not in self-defense. The male lead was not a hero, but instead a chump who ended up with only a fatal wound. It also was not a traditional mystery, as Neff tells us up front that he is the killer. The suspense was not lodged in who, but why. We want to see what happens in a relationship based upon sex and murder. In this way, the film was very much like a tabloid story where the salacious details of the relationship and the motivations for evil are the story.
Though perhaps not a movie for the whole family, Double Indemnity was a domestic financial and critical success. (Biesen 42). It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Cinematography. Though Wilder’s film won no awards, the nominations showed recognition that something noteworthy had been created. While the film complied with the American Production Code and made money for Paramount, it was less favorably received in Europe. Many European censorship boards severely restricted who could see the picture, and others banned the picture entirely. But the domestic success of the film demonstrated that the cinematic fantasy world was cracking.
Audiences were ready for adult contemporary storytelling. While the effect of life during World War II was certainly an integral component for this desire, the film also held the same basic human appeal that the lurid tabloids provided. It was sexy, sensational, and showed that a good murder tale is always one that can be recycled and still possess the power to captivate the audience.
Double Indemnity was revolutionary. The film was “ripped from the headlines” years before this became common practice in entertainment. It satisfied a morbid curiosity long before true crime podcasts, Dateline, and ID television became an entertainment staple for American audiences. The dark tale of sex and crime, filled with the style of the hard boiled literary genre, filmed in low light, and dodging the Production Code through innuendo gave rise to far more than just the genre of film noir. Though the fashions, language style, and storytelling without explicit sexual content all now seem quaint and tame, in 1944 it was gripping, titillating, and revolutionary. Double Indemnity is a common ancestor to the current genre of true crime. While it is no longer Fred MacMurray narrating the murder, we have ubiquitous narrators on television, film, and podcasts telling the tale of a true crime to audiences. True crime is what Agee described as an American Holy Trinity — money, sex and murder. Whatever we call it, the thrill is the same.
Work Cited
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Martin, Boyd. “'Double Indemnity' Crime Misses Perfection, But Movie Is Near It: Rialto Presents Adult Show.” The Courier Journal. August 25, 1944, morning edition, sec. 2.
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