Review of Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder

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My name is Ashley, and I used to work professionally as a film critic. I did that for three years while I was in graduate school, and it was cool. Got to meet a lot of famous people, go to the film festivals, interviewed some filmmakers who are now people I look up to. Eventually I wanted to do my own thing though, which is how this blog came to be in the end.

I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was one of the few income streams I had left. Those little ads in the corner give me a few pennies here and there, but when I sat down and did my finances when my potential job was gone, I realized I had enough to take some time off. And I did.

One of my many projects during this time, besides keeping a thumb on the job market and applying whenever I get the chance to jobs, is that I’ve been revisiting old movies and shows that I’ve seen years prior. I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology for my undergraduate degree, and I took a fashion history class that was focused exclusively on film.

It was taught by a prominent fashion historian whose work I had seen at popular magazines, so I was pumped. I found the class easy (although I had no idea how to write about fashion history, so I didn’t find the grading to be accessible) and fun, and one of the many movies we watched and examined was Double Indemnity.

I was thinking about this moment recently, and decided to revisit the film after all of this time. It’s always fascinating to go back to a film, compare your notes over the course of years, and see how you’ve changed your thinking or perspective on the events depicted in it.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know these can get long.

An insurance salesman plots with a woman who wants to kill her husband, leading to a ripple effect.

Similar to another Billy Wilder movie I love, Sunset Boulevard, this film opens up starting with the impacts of the film. An LA man named Walter Neff, who works as an insurance salesman, has been shot. He comes into his office to record a confession for a claims manager.

We then go back into the past. Walter is called into a home to talk about car insurance, and he starts flirting with the guy’s wife Phyllis. She asks about getting life insurance for her husband, without him knowing she’s doing that, and Walter realizes this woman might be actually talking about killing her husband. He tells her he doesn’t want to get involved, but deep down he has a crush on her.

Phyllis then stops by his apartment, and they come up with a plan to trick the husband into signing a life insurance policy, murder him, and then trigger the double indemnity clause in the policy contract. That basically means a clause for accidental death, which includes murder in some cases. Walter gets him to sign it by saying it’s a copy of the car insurance contract, but then the husband breaks his leg, forcing them to wait some more before they can enact their plan further.

When Phyllis takes her husband to the train station one day, Walter breaks the guy’s neck, and then they leave the body in the car for the next stage. They get onto the train, he pretends to be her husband, but then he jumps off of the train, and Phyllis puts her husband’s actual body on the tracks to make it look like a suicide.

The plan works, and people suspect it to be a suicide. The claims manager doesn’t though, as he finds it weird that he never filed a claim after breaking his leg. He thinks Phyllis did something, and refuses to pay out the money. Phyllis’ stepdaughter then comes up to Walter, confesses she thinks Phyllis did something to her mother to marry the guy the duo just killed, and thinks she’s next.

The claims manager then finds a guy on the train who testifies that it was not the husband on the train, and Walter goes to Phyllis to tell her that if they go to court, then they might be found liable for the death. He also tells her they shouldn’t see each other, but when he finds out that the stepdaughter’s ex-boyfriend is visiting Phyllis every night, he confronts Phyllis because he thinks she’ll come after Lola.

He then threatens to kill Phyllis after that confrontation, but she pulls out her gun and shoots at him. He comes closer to her and tells her she should shoot him again, but she’s unable to. She does admit that she didn’t love him until she shot him, but as they come together, he shoots her. He spots the ex-boyfriend on the way out, and tells him to talk to Lola.

Walter goes back to the office to record his confession. He then finds the claim manager watching him as he records it, then admits he plans to go to Mexico. As he tries to leave the office, he collapses from his wounds, and the claims manager calls both the police and an ambulance.

Overall Thoughts

It’s interesting for me to come back to this movie years later, especially after I’ve done quite a few academic readings on femme fatales and gender studies. Femme fatales can be a tricky subject when it comes to gender studies, as they’re women who show and exploit the weaker side of men’s desire. It’s very much within the male gaze that Mulvey outlines, as the camera and those watching them are coming in with a male gaze.

That said, I think this is compelling for the period that it comes from. The forties, especially during the war, were the period for femme fatales and film noir. As a noir this is such a good movie—it strikes all the right nights, the dialogue isn’t too bad, and the characters we understand quite well and why they do what they do.

In a perfect world we would understand the character of Phyllis more, but alas. It’s almost 100 years later, so we’re not getting a prequel with any of the original people involved. Regardless, I think this is a solid movie, but it can be fun to come in with a more critical eye for analysis versus just watching it and forgetting.

All of this is to say: go watch it if you’re interested and haven’t already. Film isn’t meant to be entirely read about; you should experience it as well.

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