Barbara Stanwyck (27 page)

James M. Cain first published
Double Indemnity
in serial form in 1936. Two years before, he had put out another salacious book about murder,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, with intimations of carnal depravity (when the married Cora first couples with drifter Frank Chambers, she tells him to bite her lip and he does so until he draws blood). Both books were inspired by the case of Ruth Snyder, a Queens woman who
murdered her husband with the help of another man in order to collect on the dead man's insurance.

Cain's
Double Indemnity
is told in the first person by Walter Huff (Neff in Wilder's film), an insurance salesman in Los Angeles who walks willingly into a kind of “House of Death” with blood-red drapes, the home of Nirdlinger, an oil man, and his wife Phyllis. In the film, Wilder changes Nirdlinger (a lingering nerd?) to Dietrichson (son of Marlene?), which once again shows his talent for picking just the right character names. In the book, Phyllis is “maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.” Though she has “a washed-out look,” Huff sees that “[u]nder those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts.” So, in Cain's book, we have a slightly faded dish with a great bod. Not Stanwyck, by any means; more like Veronica Lake as she was in 1952 or 1953.

“I like tea,” says Cain's rather haughty Phyllis. “It makes a break in the afternoon.” She sounds like a bored housewife, but everything she says might be calculated for effect, so it's hard to get a read on her. Walter notices a few attractive flaws in Phyllis: two teeth that were “maybe a little bit buck,” and freckles on her forehead. Tiny physical flaws like this can stoke a man's lust, and they definitely do the trick for Walter. Cain's prose is tough and funny in these early scenes. It's not classic wiseacre like Wilder's patter, but there are plenty of little laughs leading up to an ellipsis; afterwards, we can tell that Walter has laid Phyllis.

When he asks about her husband, Phyllis says, “He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman,” which in retrospect sounds strange. What is her standard for good treatment? She says she doesn't love her husband, but he's never done anything bad to her. Then, though, she reveals her psychological buckteeth: “Maybe I'm crazy, but there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm
so
beautiful, then.” A sensible man would have been out the door at “scarlet shroud,” but Walter is a little cracked himself.

Phyllis reflects that she would like to bring death to everyone, so they'd be happy, and she begins to seem not human to Walter. “The firelight was reflected in her eyes like she was some kind of leopard,” he says, employing a startling image in the middle of all the terse dialogue. Phyllis used to be a nurse, and as Walter plans to kill her husband and get a double payday from the insurance company, she often seems to be living in a dream world, but there's also a sense that in her dreamlike way she is pulling all of the strings.

After the murder, whatever feeling there was between Walter and Phyllis sours: “I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake,” says Walter. This sentiment is far removed from the tough-love tenderness Stanwyck's Jean Harrington displays when she talks about herself as an axe that needs a turkey. It comes out that Phyllis deliberately killed the first Mrs. Nirdlinger. Then it comes out that she killed three children in the hospital where she was head nurse, one of them for money, and the others just to cover her tracks.

“She's a pathological case, that's all,” says Keyes, an overweight insurance investigator. “The worst I ever heard of.” In 1936, a flat-out sociopathic murderer like Phyllis was still an exotic thing, something undreamed of by most people. Today, she's one of the fictional firsts in a long line of genetic mutations with real-life killer counterparts. Cain makes it clear that Phyllis is incapable of feeling remorse, and in his scariest scene, her stepdaughter Lola remembers walking in on her when she was wrapped in red silk fabric “like a shroud,” her face “smeared” in white powder and lipstick, standing in front of a mirror with a dagger in her hand and making faces at herself. (If Wilder had included this scene in his movie, it might have been Stanwyck's ultimate mirror moment in film, for she would have dared to look as grotesque as necessary while also doing what she needed to do to access Phyllis's ghastly, private playacting at murder). Cain's plot gets too convoluted, and his double-suicide ending on board a ship is neither very believable nor very likely, but he has laid down quite a template for any moviemaker.

Studios were interested in Cain's story right away, but the censors wouldn't let them touch it. In the early forties, the rule-breaking Wilder took the novel up in collaboration with Raymond Chandler, the hard-drinking creator of the detective character Philip Marlowe. It was a pairing of opposites, like Wilder's more storied partnership with the ivy league Charles Brackett, and it yielded a script that tarted up a lot of Cain's dialogue while shifting some of his emphasis—sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Wilder approached various actors with the script, and they were wary of it, for this was a new type of American movie, something that hadn't been seen before. There were precedents, like John Huston's
The Maltese Falcon
(1941), but this story was altogether nastier, more constricted, more pitiless.

Stanwyck admired
Double Indemnity
as a script, but she was nonetheless uncertain about it. “I had never played an out-and-out killer,” she remembered. “I had played medium heavies, but not an out-and-killer.” (I love her term “medium heavy,” which suggests there is a kind of human
scale for perfidy). She went to see Wilder. “I was a little frightened of it and, when [I went] back to his office, I said, ‘I love the script and I love you,
but
I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer. And Mr. Wilder—and rightly so—looked at me and he said, ‘Well, are you a mouse or an actress?' And I said, ‘Well, I
hope
I'm an actress.' He said, ‘Then do the part.'”

Stanwyck told this story to praise Wilder, and she always had high regard for
Indemnity
because it caused such a stir, but I wonder if her initial hesitation to take the movie spoke to her instinctive sense of what was real and interesting in a role and what wasn't. Then again, maybe she was just plain scared of playing such a bad seed. Wilder took the right schoolyard tack with her and lightly taunted her, the equivalent of a bully asking, “You chicken?” He then placed that weird blond wig on her head; even he realized a month into shooting that the wig wasn't working. Buddy DeSylva, the head of Paramount at the time, took a look at the rushes and quipped, “We hired Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.”

Wilder told Ella Smith that, “The wig was not much good, I admit,” but later on he rationalized it as part of “the phoniness of the girl—bad taste, phony wig,” as if his Phyllis is
supposed
to be wearing a wig. Is she bald, like Constance Towers at the beginning of Sam Fuller's
The Naked Kiss
(1964)? The effect is one of disfigurement, not exactly an aid to any sex appeal Stanwyck could have found for Phyllis. Cain's Phyllis is a looker but a monster inside, but Wilder's Phyllis has most of her flaws all on the surface, where we can't possibly miss them.

Still, on the level of pure craft,
Double Indemnity
deserves its status. Wilder has pruned away the unnecessary fat in the book's Lola section and also added some knockout suspense set pieces. The film feels, by and large, very modern, especially in the way it looks. We never seem to be on sets, and there's a vivid sense of Los Angeles in the exterior location shots (when Stanwyck's Phyllis enters a grocery store for the last time to scheme with Walter [Fred MacMurray], the sun is glaring down on her, and she's obviously on a real street in LA). Much of the movie's visual scheme, with all its Venetian blind shadows and cool Spanish-style architecture, must be credited to cinematographer John Seitz, who went to great lengths to achieve a dusty afternoon look for the Dietrichson house.

Under the opening credits, a man walks on crutches in silhouette to Miklos Rosza's throbbing, dissatisfied score. This image underlines a kind of impotence, both physical and moral. There are a few urgent shots
of a car speeding through the dead of night, and this feeling of a deserted nighttime LA is amplified when MacMurray's Walter knocks on the door of his office building. An elevator operator lets him in and talks about how the company wouldn't let him take out insurance because of a heart condition. Walter deals with his chatter curtly, even rudely. But he's been shot, see, so he has to amble to his office and make his confession, which sets up the first-person narration that carries Cain's book.

This narration is often redundant. When he walks around the Dietrichson home, Walter tells us in words what we already see; such verbal reinforcement is Wilder's writerly weakness. There are several points in this movie when Walter is going about his business and we can see what he's doing and feeling (MacMurray is outstanding as this weak man corrupted by his job), yet when we see Walter bowling, for instance, Wilder has Walter's voiceover tell us that he's bowling, and why. Wilder doesn't quite trust the audience, and falls victim, sometimes, to over-explaining.

The question remains whether Wilder impedes or helps Stanwyck's performance as Phyllis. By my lights he sometimes does get in her way, not only with that blond wig, but in subtler ways, both visual and verbal—yet she barrels right through him anyway and does some of her most complex work. Her Phyllis is introduced standing at the top of a staircase, wearing only a towel and holding her sunglasses, so that Walter and the camera peer up at her. But there's nothing too sexual about this entrance; Wilder is too busy giggling. Walter is looking for her husband, he says, to discuss an automobile policy. “Anything I can do?” asks Phyllis, in a brazen come-on voice. “I'd hate to think of you having a smashed fender or something when you're not … fully covered,” Walter smirks, almost laughing.

She's been taking a sunbath, she says. “No pigeons around, I hope,” says Walter. To his credit, MacMurray's face falls a bit, as if Walter is embarrassed after saying this, and MacMurray's gesture is a good way of dealing with such a gross Wilder joke. Wilder himself said he used to taunt the puritanical Chandler with tales of his lively sex life, and there were women who responded to his brand of ribaldry, which is such a thin veil for contempt. These women must have said Wilder was “so funny,” but humor comes from good places and bad places, and Wilder's humor is from a particularly bad taste neighborhood, one where you're probably going to get your gentler sensibilities mugged.

We see Phyllis's cheap shoes as she walks down the stairs; they have pom-poms on the toes, like something Joan Crawford would have worn in the early thirties (Wilder sets his tale in 1938 to explain why Neff isn't
in the army). Walter makes a dumb joke about
The Philadelphia Story
(1940), and Phyllis, who has been applying lipstick in a mirror, snaps the lipstick shut to show her impatience with him. She sits down and crosses her shapely legs so he can see her anklet; he notices it, which was her intent, and she uncrosses her legs. When he talks about insurance, Phyllis paces back and forth, and we can see her weighing things in her mind, nervously.

It's never made terribly clear whether her nervousness in these first scenes is partly real or entirely feigned. Writer Nick Davis sees Stanwyck's “first sequence of coaxing Walter Neff into her murderous stratagems not as the first, purposefully amateur stage of a larger plot but as an imperfectly managed ploy; she doesn't harden or elevate Phyllis into a diabolical genius, but presents her as a woman who unmistakably dislikes her husband and dislikes her step-daughter.” The Phyllis we see initially, Davis writes, has to work at being a monster. I think that Stanwyck is trying to complicate Phyllis in these first scenes, since she knows that the plot is going to box her tightly as a villain later on (it should be remembered that Stanwyck always learned the whole script and made a point of keeping the entire thing in her head at all times).

There's no doubt, though, about what she's doing in the famous fore-play dialogue that ends this first encounter, a scene that has been so endlessly excerpted on TV that it's tattooed on most of our brains. Its dialogue almost plays like a vaudeville patter routine. That tone might just be a clue to Stanwyck's basic approach to this part and this movie. Did the specter of career vaudevillian Frank Fay raise its ugly head in her mind while she was playing this woman who loathes her husband and wants him dead? She observed Fay's routines on stage during her formative years, and in 1933 she even sank her own money into a Fay revue,
Tattle Tales
, which marked the last time, regrettably, that Stanwyck acted on stage (she did scenes from her Capra films). Add a dash of Wilder's Weimar vinegar to this Fay training, and here it is:

“There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour,” says Phyllis, very fast, almost as if she's waiting for the next “Who's on first?” line. “How fast was I going, Officer?” parries Neff, the salesman incarnate. “I'd say around ninety,” she says, with a lower inflection—heated, but a parody of “heated,” too. “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket,” raps out Neff, quick as a shot. “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” says Phyllis, suddenly a dominatrix. “Suppose it doesn't take,” he continues (hit me harder, Mistress!). “Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles,” she purrs (Production
Code? What Production Code?). “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” he ponders, a canny masochist. “Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder,” she snaps, just like she impatiently closed her lipstick in front of the mirror. “That tears it,” he concludes, and the operative word here is “tears.” Wilder is at his best when he turns his wordsmith glee to slang terms, the gaudier and more disposable the better. Phyllis has completely emasculated this man in one rapid-fire exchange, and he loves it. But she's weary of her own power, a feeling which maybe reads as the uncertainty we sometimes see in her eyes and in her movements.