Straight Down the Line
A few years ago, a British insurance company ran a television advert. A dark and sinister television advert.
It featured a young couple (with their dog) setting up their first home.
The young, glamorous wife immediately sets her scheme in motion.
"Before you do, can you sort out your life insurance," she says, exchanging a knowing glance with the dog. She hands her husband a tablet with the forms already pre-loaded.
The husband of course falls for the whole thing and signs his name to the policy, sealing his fate as he gullibly comments on "how easy it was" before heading off to the kitchen (and presumably his violent death) leaving the wife and the dog to collect the insurance money and head for some tropical country with sandy beaches and no extradition laws.
What... you didn't find that advert dark and sinister? You don't think the wife and the beagle were planning her husband's murder so she could collect the insurance payout?
Have you seen Double Indemnity?
Guess what: you're about to!
Released in 1944, Double Indemnity was director Billy Wilder's first true drama (after a comedy and a war movie, plus an action romp that he had made in France but later disowned).
Double Indemnity is also considered by many to be one of the foundational films of Hollywood's "noir" era. It tells the story of Walter Neff (played by the usually jovial Fred MacMurray) a slick insurance salesman who meets sultry housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) during a routine appointment about renewing an auto insurance policy. When she begins asking questions about taking out life insurance on her husband "without his knowing about it" Walter immediately guesses what's on her mind, but he's too busy drooling over the sheer Barbara Stanwyck-ness of her to worry about the ethical implications of murdering husbands for the insurance payout.
And then, almost before he can say "I'm crazy about you, baby," he's hiding in their car, strangling her husband for her and staging an "accident" for the benefit of the insurance investigators.
When the French critic Nico Frank described "what used to be called the detective film genre, but which would now be better termed the crime, or, even better yet, the "crime psychology film" (in his attempt to define "dark cinema") he was talking explicitly about Double Indemnity, which he had recently seen.
There had been plenty of crime thrillers before this one. There were murder mysteries, whodunnits, gangster movies and even a few hard-boiled detective stories. But this?
Double Indemnity felt different. Because in this film, the "hero" is the murderer: Walter Neff is the main character of the film, and he's not gang member or a hoodlum; he's just an ordinary working guy with a libido and a Barbara Stanwyck. Everything is told from his point of view, and he even narrates the story for us.
That effectively places us in the position of the criminal; a very uncomfortable position to be in (for those of us with a moral centre). We also know from the very beginning what is going to happen. He is not going to get away with it, and neither is she. We can watch them run in circles, trying to pull off the perfect murder, trying to run rings around the insurance investigator (Edward G. Robinson) but of course they won't succeed. They committed a murder. They're the bad guys. And bad guys don't win.
But that doesn't mean we have to be happy when they lose. This is what Film Noir means. It's a tragedy in the grandest possible sense: their ultimate undoing is both inevitable and of their own making. "Straight down the line" as they keep saying to each other. There is only one place this story is going to go, and everyone knows it.
But like every good tragedy, you can't tear your eyes away. And cinema would never be the same again.
We'll screen Double Indemnity at 7.30 on Thursday, the 30th of January at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
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