Double Indemnity

Frost's Descent fell on 23 October; five days on we are in its second pentad, when the grasses yellow and the leaves come down, with the Beginning of Winter still ten days off. These are the weeks when the light leaves fastest — and the best weeks of the year for black-and-white film.

Both films today are about the same thing: something carefully built comes down.

The two men at their centres do remarkably similar work. They take fragments and assemble them into a structure that will stand. Walter Neff sells insurance, an industry that predicts how people die from a table; David Huxley assembles a dinosaur from bones. Both believe that if every piece is correct, the whole cannot fall.

The difference is the speed. One comes down slowly enough that you can hear each joint let go; the other comes down so fast that you only notice in the last three minutes.

The slow one first.

深夜，洛杉矶一栋写字楼的某一层还亮着灯。一个男人捂着肩膀走进办公室，在椅子上坐下，按下录音机的开关，开始对着一台机器说话——他要说给一个不在场的人听。

他说，一切是从一次上门续保开始的。

一年前的下午，他去一户人家谈汽车保险续期。开门的是这家的女主人，站在楼梯上，脚踝上戴着一条链子。她问了一个不该问的问题：能不能给她的丈夫买一份人寿保险，而不让他本人知道。

他听懂了这句话的意思，当场推掉，开车走了。但他没有真的走开。

This is one of the load-bearing walls of film noir. Paramount released it on 6 July 1944: 107 minutes, black and white. Together with The Maltese Falcon it fixed how dark an American city night was allowed to be.

The record is unambiguous. Seven Academy Award nominations and no wins at the 17th Oscars — Picture, Director, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Score, Sound. It entered the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1992. AFI ranked it 38th in 1998 and 29th in the 2007 revision; Phyllis Dietrichson stands 8th among AFI's greatest villains. The BBC put it 35th among the greatest American films in 2015, and Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed it 196th. Rotten Tomatoes 97% from 110 reviews; Metacritic 95 from 18.

There is a second layer of importance outside the text: this is a screenplay by the novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder called his first draft useless camera instruction and handed him his own 1941 script for Hold Back the Dawn as a teaching text. Chandler was a recovering alcoholic; Wilder later said, I drove him back into drinking. They never worked together again.

Contemporary notices were not unanimous. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found it monotonous in pace and overlong, and complained that the two leads lacked the appeal to make their fate matter. Hitchcock, meanwhile, wrote to Wilder that since Double Indemnity the two most important words in motion pictures were Billy and Wilder.