It was an unconventional film, challenging almost a decade of Production Code battles to & #8230 Cain's literature.
A small number would refute that Double Indemnity is a perfect film noir and one of the most significant movies in Hollywood history. Imperative here is Cain's standing, and the untimely 1980s revitalization of notice in Cain's work, nevertheless more important is Double Indemnity's advantaged place in the noir principle. For want of a screen credit recognizing the source property, the remake becomes a hypothetical construct or role of the film's production and response. Body Heat can be expressed as a masquerading or unacknowledged remake, a film that repeats basic story units from the Cain novel (and Wilder adaptation) but changes the details of its name, location, period, character names and the those like it. Wilder's film and Cain's novel - even supposing it does not credit the book as its source. By modeling Double Indemnity into a homicidal melodrama with sexual insinuations, Wilder produced a rational crime accomplishment. Wilder took the focal point off Robinson's role and cultivated his viewpoint, in disparity to the many detective films of the age that instigated in novels of Raymond Chandler, his co-conspirator. Wilder underplayed the father-son relationship in addition to the "police routine" constituent that could have made his film a "detective tale" more willingly than a twisty noir, which is what it in actuality is. Robinson), the claims examiner who believes Phyllis, but not Walter, of the crime. It was the walk of a dead man."ĭouble Indemnity moreover has a homoerotic bond between Walter Neff and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Pretty, isn't it?," "There was no way in the world I may perhaps have known that murder occasionally can smell like honeysuckle," or "I couldn't hear my footsteps. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. And those magnificent lines: "Yes, I killed him for money and for a woman.
Watch Walter and Phyllis as they get together in a luminous white southern California superstore, sporting dark glasses, not shopping or still watching each other while plotting up plans for a homicide. Double Indemnity is the most excellent example of a noir film to date: rough as sandpaper, with acerbic, wrenching dialogue and practical sets. (in the new novel, Walter and Phyllis go off jointly on a journey, happily back together.) in accordance with the "crime doesn't pay" principles of the era, Billy Wilder even added a shot of Neff dying in the San Quentin gas chamber, but thought the film looked better with the film concluding as Neff hears the wails of police and/or ambulance sirens approaching.
Thinking she has an additional, much younger admirer, he murders her in a rage of jealousy, then in all probability bleeds to death from a shot fired by the perishing Phyllis, having first relegated the complete story of the film in a two-hour flashback.
#Walter neff double indemnity analysis movie
What makes this film a wonderful case in point of the culture and style of film noir is that, as stated by the movie production convention of the period, jealousy becomes a part of Walter's relationship with Phyllis after he does the crime. She plots to kill her husband in a "railroad mishap" that would bring her a double indemnity insurance imbursement. (Barbara Stanwyck), an anklet-sporting femme fatale/housewife. Paper NOW! TOPIC: Term Paper on Film Analysis of Double Indemnity AssignmentIn Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a to some extent cute but dim insurance agent, becomes prey to the charms of a flirtatious blonde, Phyllis Dietrieckson. Supported by Miklos Rozsa's throbbing film score and John Seitz's expressionistic black-and-white camera work, Wilder had no valid idea he was filming in a technique called "noir" he found out about this many years later, to his great astonishment. Cain is accredited as the original novel and Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder contribute to screenplay credit, the film is in fact based on the case of Ruth Snyder, a criminal murderess who breathed her last breath in the electric chair on January 13, 1928. "From the moment they met, it was murder!" This is the legendary tag line for Billy Wilder's most incisive film noir, Double Indemnity, even though in 1944, when it was first released in New York on September 11, critics called it a melodrama, an elongated dose of premeditated suspense," "with a pragmatism evocative of earlier period French films ," with characters as rough, solid and inflexible as steel.Įven though James M.