Daily Archives: Wednesday, January 1, 2014

  • Double Indemnity Billy Wilder (Usa 1944)

    P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }

    Double Indemnity Billy Wilder (USA
    1944) Barabara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Edward G Robinson

    Viewed DVD Boxing Day 2013

    Mythic Surprise Party
    One thing that struck me about Double
    indemnity was that it was on the whole in terms of its images highly
    abstract. Its actual concerns were located in the realm of ideas and
    myth and the film was the more the powerful
    for this bias.
    Most commentators or at least the ones
    I have read, pick out Wilder’s Double Indemnity as a prime exemplar
    of the film noir genre. Reviewers agree that all the film’s
    constituent elements were superbly crafted and delivered to produce a
    very fine movie.

    Let’s start with the structure of the
    film. Double indemnity is structured as a back story told in the
    course of Frank’s confession into Keyes’ dictaphone. This appliance
    is a sort of confession machine; a mythical hole in the rock into
    which you whisper your sins. It’s an automated depersonalised
    confessional that intensifies and triggers the truth telling reflex
    in an immoral irreligious age that responds to technology but not to
    authority. In Wilder’s hands it’s a device which is never strained
    or stretched and in the final scene the machine is cleverly but not
    artificially, integrated into the film’s climax.

    The script from a James Cain story has
    a relentless narrative drive boned and honed by Raymond Chandler and
    Wilder, spiced with sour dark dialogue for Phylis and Frank, and
    variant wiseacring from Keyes.

    The acting; high energy performances
    from Stanwyck (the allure of the fake and brittle, in a wig) McMurray and
    Robinson.

    The cinematography: John Seitz’s
    high key noir mood lighting rigs reflect the protagonists states of
    mind. And the camera movement: Wilder’s direction makes use of
    tracking shots to shift perspective and heighten psychological
    affect. We see a scene that starts with a CLOSE SHOT of the
    conspiring couple about to make love on the sofa in Frank’s
    apartment. The camera suddenly tracks back pulling Phylis and Frank
    into a WIDE PERSPECTIVE. The effect of the movement is to strip back
    the naked raw desire driving their intention; but at the same time
    also reveals them as vulnerable and alone together, pre-doomed by
    the crime that lies before them.

    But Double Indemnity is more than the
    sum of all its qualities because it’s caste in a mythic form, which
    gives the film a psychic authenticity that connects its action to a
    grounded meaning. I don’t think that any one myth underlies Double
    Indemnity, rather that the script suggests a number of mythic
    sources, some Biblical and some Classical.

    The core of the film’s mythic grounding
    lies in the relationship between the two male protagonists. At the
    end of the film Frank lies bleeding to death on the floor at the
    door of the Company with Keyes beside him. He tells Keyes that Keyes
    was too close to him to see what he was doing. Keyes replies: “Closer
    than that…” Frank looks up at him and says: “Love you too.”
    Extraordinary final dialogue! At once we understand that the theme
    of the film is betrayal. This dialogue might construe a homoerotic
    relationship between the men, the love that dare not speak its name.
    More plausibly in relation to what we have seen, it might indicate
    the love that develops in the relationship between master and
    apprentice, master and disciple. A love characterised by an immense
    fondness: The love of Moses for Aaron, of Jesus for Judas, the love
    of Laius for Oedipus. The mythic theme underlying Double Indemnity
    is the epic of betrayal, the leaving of the true and righteous path
    of virtue for the gratification of desire. The forsaking of the love
    of the master and his teachings for the blandishments of the flesh

    The Pacific Insurance Company (shot as
    a modern Temple of Commerce) is represented as a good and decent
    place. It is the repository of a belief system that serves the
    decency of the American way of life. Keyes is a high priest and
    Frank his acolyte and successor. Both men symbolise in their roles
    the forces of truth which have to stand firm against the
    destabilising forces of putrescence and deception that seek to
    undermine the Temple. Seduced by the flesh Frank betrays his love
    for the Master, leaves the Temple and takes up residence in the
    Brothel. In so doing, like Judas, he also determines the course of
    his own destruction. Psychically castrated Frank cannot survive
    without the sustaining love of his master.

    Interestingly it is perhaps this very
    love between the two men that overburdons Frank. As if Frank is
    overwhelmed by the expectation of Keyes’ too great a love, and can
    only respond to the inner tensions that it causes by betrayal, a
    course of action that will destroy himself and perhaps Keyes. A true love story.
    There is a wonderfully scripted
    leitmotif that defines the relationship between the two male
    protagonists: the Promethian spark. Throughout the movie Keyes asks
    Frank for a light for his cigar. Frank always obliges. He takes a
    match and flicking the nail of his thumb against its head, ignites
    it. It’s a cheap trick, but as an image it effectively suggests the
    idea of an energised cathartic relationship bonding the two men. The
    spark that passes from the the younger man to the older: sexual
    energy, the spark of knowledge, the fire of life. A metaphor for a
    Promethean pact, a pact that is expertly reversed in the final scene
    when Keyes demonstrates that he too is a consummate fire master and
    lights Frank\s final cigarette with a match lit by a flick of his own
    thumb.

    The film works and retains its power
    because working through a mythological casting of images, fire,
    sacrifice, betrayal castration love it links the audience to a series
    of primal archetypal elements that engage and link psychic states of
    mind to action.

    One final thought. Wilder when he made
    Double Indemnity still seems to retain a belief in the moral solidity
    of American capitalism. There is a certain collective commitment
    that morally sustained the system. Wilder (and Chandler presumably)
    saw that it was under threat from the new and increasingly
    intensified forces of individuated desire. But in this movie, the
    moral collective, the Temple holds its ground; it sees off the
    brothel and the raging forces and the chaos of the id. Decency
    represented by high priest Keyes wins, even if it is sorely wounded
    as there are still enough good men left standing. By the time Wilder
    makes Ace in the Hole in 1951, he has lost belief in the ability of
    the American system to be decent. He sees the organisation of big
    business irremediably corrupted by individual desire. The good no
    longer can withstand the bad. On the outside the Temple might still
    look like it is standing but inside it has turned into a brothel.
    The era of an unashamed and unrestrained individualism is beginning.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk