"Closer than that, Walter"

DOUBLE INDEMNITY was on television. I know it well but looking in just as the credits rolled I was reeled in again and sat there fascinated until the last bitter moment. Billy Wilder's hardboiled 1944 noir classic is still a giant of the genre, as scriped by Raymond Chandler. So many marvellous lines to savour.  Barbara Stanwyck has her all-time classic role as Phyllis Dietrichson, that suburban Medusa lying in wait in that dusty 1930s California spanish-style home, to trap some stupid sap insurance man into that plot to kill her husband whom she now despises, after, as it turns out, killing his invalid wife some years previously when she was her nurse. Walter Neff (Fred McMurray is just right here) is just the perfect cocky guy who falls into her clutches, and together they plan their perfect crime. But his associate Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson) comes to feel his gut reaction that something is wrong with the case. Why didn't the victim make a claim for his injured leg? - maybe because he did not know he was insured for accidents .....

It is a bleak, pitiless world where the lovers meet in that early type supermarket, and oddly, the door to Neff's apartment opens outwards - convenient for when Keyes drops in on Neff, just as Phyllis is about to arrive, and can hide behind the open door .... then the scales fall from Neff's eyes and the lovers meet one last time. She shoots first but can't finish it as she suddenly realises she has feelings after all ... and finally our fatally injured sap tells all into the dictating maching as Keyes arrives and hears all. Walter tells him he could not see who the guy was as he was too close, just across his desk - to which Barton dryly comments that he was closer than that ....

Wilder shot additional scenes of Neff in the gas chamber, but realised they were not needed, just like he did in SUNSET BOULEVARD, his other great classic (apart from SOME LIKE IT HOT and THE APARTMENT) showing Joe Gillis's corpse arriving at the morgue and the other corpses asking him how he got there - but preview audiences laughed at this, so Wilder wisely scrapped it (but its on the dvd extras). But we will always have Phyllis with her ankle bracelet artfully drawing Neff into her web with that sparking talk of a speed limit which Walter was exceeding ..... Play it again ! I may now have to go back and re-see GILDA, LAURA, MILDRED PIERCE, ROAD HOUSE, OUT OF THE PAST, NOTORIOUS, etc .... Black and white '40s noirs, theres nothing like them.