He may have stopped over to update her husband’s automobile insurance, but we understand, if he doesn’t quite yet, that everything has changed. By the time she comes downstairs a few minutes later, the camera clinging to the anklet above her left shoe, Neff is already in play. This is apparent from the moment we first encounter Phyllis Dietrichson-the dissatisfied wife, the femme fatale, played by Barbara Stanwyck with a manipulative vulnerability-standing at the top of a spiral staircase wearing nothing but a towel.

It is a tale of murder, but even more it is a story of lust. “There are no vital and significant forms of art,” he insists in “The Simple Art of Murder” “there is only art, and precious little of that.” Double Indemnity bears this out with the force of a locomotive. Chandler, like Cain, was a pioneering figure in the literature of Southern California, a writer who used the conventions of popular storytelling (three-act structure, the rise and fall of melodrama) for more enduring literary effect. The film Double Indemnity is an American masterpiece also, the product of a creative holy trinity: Cain, of course, along with Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who wrote the script. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.” “I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim,” Cain once observed of his writing, “or any of the things I am usually called. Double Indemnity presents a ruthless saga of betrayal, in which the most unredeemable sins are those the characters commit against themselves.

In 125 unrelenting pages, Cain not only indicts middle-class greed and shallowness, he also paints a considerably darker portrait of a man and a woman consumed by their desires. And then there’s this: The novel on which it is based, the second book by James M. In the first place, it’s a quintessential Los Angeles narrative-moody, atmospheric, shot (some of it, in any case) on location in the city, beginning with that opening sequence, Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, mid-thirties, insurance salesman on the make, at the tail end of a murder plot that has come undone (how could it not?), driving frantically down Wilshire Boulevard toward the confessional of his mentor’s Dictaphone. For the last few years, I’ve made a point of showing Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir Double Indemnity to my students at the University of Southern California.

Double indemnity james cain