Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I’ve been spending the better part of the last three years watching every noir under the sun (although that should probably be under the bleak, rainy sky) and this one has been on the radar the entire time.
Did I Like It: And rightly so. It is, if nothing else, the quintessential Film Noir. After a year of watching other films in the genre, its tempting to feel something like discontentment, and that I’ve seen all of this before, but the considered opinion is that this was the spring from which this format mostly sprung, and ever b-crime picture made for the next ten years was desperately trying to capture something of Double Indemnity’s magic.
And it is, indeed, all there. A working-class schmo (MacMurray) gets mixed up with an unattainable, but still somehow available—usually married—woman (Stanwyck). All of their money troubles will evaporate all of a sudden if they just kill some ultimately harmless jerk (Tom Powers). Things go mostly great, except for one little problem. Loyalties bounce around, and are schmo gets his comeuppance, reminding everyone as he goes to his fate—be it prison or the great beyond—that he wasn’t a bad guy. He just got mixed up with the wrong dame.
Mix. Repeat.
This may sound like damning the film with faint praise, but it’s a pretty good format to originate. It naturally builds tension as the world starts collapsing in on the schmo. One wonder if it might have even kept a few potential schmoes from starting the cycle in their own lives.
The only real complaint I have against the film comes, again, from the disadvantage of age and experience. Just as I came to this film late, I can’t help but look at MacMurray, remember years of Nick at Nite and the Disney channel, and seeing not a dangerous criminal in too far, but the dad from My Three Sons and various riffs on The Absent-Minded Professor (1961).
Gee, I wish I could somehow be unmoored from the constraints of time and see every movie in the context for which they were meant.