Double Indemnity often tops the list when it comes to the best noir cinema ever made. What is the secret to its brilliance? Well, the James M. Cain source novel is an American classic, and none other than the great Raymond Chandler was hired to help to give it a film treatment. Add director Billy Wilder to moodily light and film the hardboiled Los Angeles setting, and the once-in-a-century perfect American cinematic cocktail is all but complete.
While some might find the doomed romance and brilliant acting to be justification enough for the film’s outsize reputation, I’d argue that the film’s power derives from its message of redemption.
The film tells the story of an insurance salesman, Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray) and married housewife, Phyllis Dietrichson (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who begin a torrid affair and plan to bump off her husband for the insurance money. If one considers the film to be the story of these two lovers, it can seem like just another noir about bad people doing worse things. But if we look to the third major star on the film’s bill, Edward G. Robinson, the theme of redemption comes to the fore.
Robinson, one of Hollywood’s best character actors of the noir period, plays MacMurray’s insurance company coworker, Barton Keyes, an honest and intelligent claims adjuster, circling in on the adulterous killers as they attempt to claim a fifty thousand-dollar double indemnity insurance payout and avoid the death chamber.
Setting the insurance investigator’s acumen aside, the murder is indeed quite clever. Walter Neff, kills the husband and then pretends to be the husband to make a deadly accident seem plausible, pulling off a seemingly perfect murder. Even the extremely perceptive Keyes has to admit that he’s seen a lot of fishy deaths but never one where a man broke his neck by falling off a slowly moving train. Neff, an experienced insurance salesman, had long fantasized about how one could successfully pull off such a murder, before his affair with Phyllis gave him the impetus to put his plan into action.
I’d argue that the cat and mouse game between Neff and Keyes, not the doomed love affair, provides the key to understanding the film’s power. At the start of the film, Keyes is not only Walter Neff’s coworker and nemesis but his true friend and mentor. Early on, the older and wiser Keyes tries to convince Neff to stop working out in the street and come to work in the office with him. Despite their tough-talking banter, Keyes, worries about Neff getting himself into trouble.
And it is this father-like concern that Neff exploits in his ploy to avoid detection as he knows that Keyes has a soft spot for him.
“You know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes?” Neff says later in a touching exchange. “Because the guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.”
To which Keyes gives the immortal four-word reply.
“Closer than that, Walter.”
The film’s structure underscores their relationship. In the novel, Neff just begins telling the story from the beginning. The film instead opens with Neff driving erratically through nighttime LA to his office. Staggering into his insurance office, bleeding from a lead slug in his belly (put there by Stanwyck, we later learn, after their murderous plan went sideways) Neff picks up a Dictaphone, ready to recount the whole incredible story (cinematically presented as a series of flashbacks).
The film’s full emotional power asserts itself when the flashback ends, and we are transported back to the bleeding Neff in his insurance office, for it is only then that we finally realize why Neff has been telling the story of betrayal, adultery, and murder: it is his confession to Keyes.
By directing his words to his moral compass, Walter’s confession is proof of his regret. In his final moments, Neff turns to seek forgiveness and redemption from his beloved friend.
This request for forgiveness, and Keye’s willingness to grant it, shown in the final moments of the film as he lights Neff’s last cigarette, elevates what otherwise what would have been just a stylish and well-executed display of titillating sex and violence and snappy dialogue into a work of art.
We all are tempted by the glamour of evil, the film tells us. But when we succumb to these temptations and come to see how thin the shiny façade of greed and lust really are, even the worst of us possess the free will to ask for forgiveness.
Even the cold femme fatale, Stanwyck, is given a moment of redemptive clarity when, after shooting Neff, she pauses from shooting him again as he approaches her.
When Neff asks why, she explains that though she used him, she suddenly realizes that she has real affection for him, love which, for the first time in her life, has forestalled her ruthless nature. In this way, she, too, dies redeemed.
Why is this redemption so key to Double Indemnity’s storytelling power?
Aristotle, in his famous treatise on tragedy, points out that the purpose of drama is to purge a viewer’s terror and pity.
Double Indemnity first builds us up, as we experience the story’s illicit sex and murder and suspenseful fear of being caught. But by the end of the story, as we come to realize the added moral dimension of Ness’s heartfelt confession and desire to be forgiven by his friend, we see this terror of misdeeds transformed and reversed with a sudden flash into a feeling of pity.
This same terror-to-pity tragic reversal happens in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
Viewers of the ancient Greek tragedy play already knew the famous legend of how Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. As they watched, they drew dramatic suspense from wondering when Oedipus would finally find out about his own terrible crimes.
Once he does, the tragic reversal begins and a sudden swooping catharsis comes to the audience, suddenly and euphorically relieved from terror of impending doom, instead feeling heartfelt pity for a man undone by his ignorance and redeemed by his sense of guilt.
Double Indemnity’s authors weren’t attempting to make a statement about society or the political realities of the time—on the contrary, Cain and Chandler and Wilder were taking timeless Sophoclean tragedy and skillfully and successfully updating it for the modern audience.
We, like Oedipus and his modern cousin, Walter Neff, are also flawed. We, too, because of our human appetites, and through our own lack of knowledge, make terrible mistakes.
Noir shares another commonality with tragedy—both heighten our awareness that life comes to an end, and this awareness can increase our willingness to seek redemption, and to forgive others for their trespasses. Death’s inevitability —because it is our shared destiny— can be an ever-flowing fountain from which universal human forgiveness and connection and compassion can spring.
It is in this balance—between our human appetite for selfishness and the human need for selflessness, forgiveness and pity—that Double Indemnity finds its enduring power.
