Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity (1944) is about an insurance salesman killing a woman's husband with her, and it set the template for the genre. Walter Neff goes to a house to renew a policy. Phyllis Dietrichson opens the door. She wants accident insurance taken out without her husband knowing. Neff understands what is being asked and knows he should leave. He does not. The plan is to make it look like a fall from a train; a clause doubles the payout if death occurs on one. That is where the title comes from. The film ends in its first scene. Neff, wounded, walks into his office and starts dictating a confession. We know from the start who died and who was caught; all the tension comes from how it unravelled. The real relationship is between Neff and his boss Keyes, a claims investigator who senses false claims and genuinely loves him. The emotional weight sits there rather than in the murder. Billy Wilder wrote it with Raymond Chandler. It was Chandler's first screenplay and the two loathed each other; they fought throughout, and the text that came out of it is a benchmark for the genre. The source is James M. Cain's novel. Wilder shot an ending he did not use: Neff executed in the gas chamber. It was expensive and he cut it, saying the film's real ending came before it. It runs 107 minutes, in black and white. Good for: noir, classic Hollywood, and screenplay structure. Less good for: the pacing belongs to its period and the dialogue may read as overwrought now.