Dames with shady intentions and gullible gentlemen - even though this is a blueprint of most film noir movies, Double Indemnity is a classic that set the standard for the genre (in good and bad ways): it's elegant, atmospheric and it creates that peculiar and haunting mystique that L.A. has in these movies (driving around in cars always plays an important role) - even nature always looks artificial, bathing in white light or sinister shadows. And, of course, Raymond Chandler's writing ("I'm rotten to the heart...") provided a hard-boiled edge. Wilder is a master director and Barbara Stanwyck is not bad as the femme fatale. The title refers to a technicality in the insurance company business and it is for sure not the plot that keeps Double Indemnity interesting (even though it has its good suspense moments where you are anxious to see what will happen next). The weakest aspect of it may be the, as I saw it, very typical use of flashbacks. But maybe I say this because I have watched too many crime movies from the same era in which a dire male voice belonging to a man who slopes in a chair in some office presents his present situation and how his destiny was shaped. When you think about it - how many film noir movies have you seen which are narrated by the alluring dame?
The story: Insurance company man gets involved in a murder plot: by a cover-up, money will be paid by the insurance company. It's a dame, of course, that makes him complicit in a crime. The film suggests that people are driven by sex, money or professional honor. But as some reviewers have pointed out: the mystery of the film is that these characters do not seem interested in what on the surface drives them. I think that is correct and it opens up an interesting tangle of questions: how should the coldness of the two main characters be understood? One possibility would be to interpret the film on a par with Cronenberg's Crash, as a film about boredom and excitement and thrill as flight. Everything, eventually, will go to hell. This is a world of doom and gloom (if you look for one example of fatalism in film noir, this is a good bet). Once again, I cannot resist to make a comment about the misogyny in many noir movies: the guy is a victim of the circumstances and his own drives, while the women will turn their own lives into hell by trying to manipulate others: the temptress will be destroyed, perhaps, like in this film, with the sordid farewell by a man who holds a gun: "goodbye, baby". But the woman's destiny is only an aspect of the male protagonist's grandiose path towards final destruction (one reviewer snarls - I don't know whether it is a joke - that at least women get to enjoy seeing other women who has a lot of power for a little while). This is the formula: one manipulates, the other is being manipulated. We've seen it before: the dame acts innocent, performs the role of the little girl in need of a male protector, while she is as a matter of fact pursuing her own agenda. Or could another possibility be that the femme fatale and her counterpart, the clueless male victim of her seduction, be interpreted as a dark story about heterosexuality as a game the logic of which is the dynamic of a surface and a secret that is all the time hinted at and glossed over only to re-appear in more fatal and dangerous ways. I don't know to what extent this makes better sense of Wilder's film, but I think this casts some light on heterosexuality. And if one continues on that line of thought, the attempt to reveal a fundamental set of primary drives (the woman's and the man's) is bound to fail (a very different perspective is to ask what is going on when a person is giving in to a temptation).
Interestingly, there is also something else going on beyond the conventional crime story. One interpretation of the film is that the ending scene reveals the deep love between the insurance company man and his boss who has been trying to solve the mystery. Sadly, this dimension is not explored that much.
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