Double Indemnity
This shrewd, smoothly tawdry thriller, directed by Billy Wilder, is one of the high points of nineteen-forties films. Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—a platinum blonde who wears tight white sweaters, an anklet, and sleazy-kinky shoes—is perhaps the best acted and the most fixating of all the slutty, cold-blooded femmes fatales of the film-noir genre. With her bold stare, her sneering, over-lipsticked, thick-looking mouth and her strategically displayed legs, she’s a living entrapment device. Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, an insurance salesman, is the patsy she ensnares in a plot to kill her businessman husband and collect on the double-indemnity clause in his policy. And as Keyes, the claims investigator for the insurance company, Edward G. Robinson handles his sympathetic role with an easy mastery that gives the film some realistic underpinnings. It needs them, because the narration is often so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of period hardboiled attitudes. This defect may be integral to the film’s taut structure.
— Pauline Kael
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