BEFORE: There's part of me that's already on vacation in some ways - I'm not buying too much food so the fridge will be closer to empty, I've done laundry with an eye toward what I'm going to wear for the next 2 weeks, and I'm working out how to control my DVR with my phone so it doesn't get all filled up with the wrong shows.
I worked my way back to Edward G. Robinson, after a few extraneous crime films - maybe I should have put this right after "Robin and the 7 Hoods" but this kicks off a whole chain of calculated murders. This is also a certified classic, it's on the AFI list of Top 100 films, plus the "1,000 Films to See Before You Die" list.
THE PLOT: An insurance rep lets himself be talked into a murder/fraud scheme that arouses an investigator's suspicions.
AFTER: I'm not exactly thrilled with excitement over this one - sure, it's a classic film noir, but I'm either not a big fan of the genre, or there are ways where it hasn't aged well. Generally I look back on all those Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett stories from the 1930's and 1940's and think they're all rather silly. Everyone apparently walked around in overcoats all the time, and hats, and called women "dames" and carried concealed pistols. In many ways I find science-fiction films more believable.
The speech patterns are really odd - the guy from Medford, Oregon says things like, "I'm from Medford, Oregon, and in Medford we like to take our time and not rush things. Did I mention I'm from Medford, Oregon?" Yeah, thanks, we picked up on that. Where are you from, again? The other people all use that old-timey gangster slang, the kind that (I think) only existed in the movies, and on one block in Brooklyn.
The title refers to an insurance clause that pays out double if certain conditions are met. But even though the mastermind of the scheme is an insurance expert, it still looks shady if you take out a double-payment clause on a particular thing, and then that thing happens just 2 weeks later. Did the insurance expert really think that wasn't going to arouse suspicion?
So insurance expert falls for a married woman, and they take out this policy on her husband, then dispatch him (takes place off-camera, the film didn't say exactly how they did the deed), and then wait to collect on the policy. I don't think you could pull this kind of scheme today, because forensics have gotten so good that a medical examiner could say, "Hey, this guy's injuries are inconsistent with the way we think he died - and what's with these hand-shaped bruises on his neck?"
Of course, this film was released back in 1944 (though it's set in 1938 for some reason - maybe because during the war all that everybody talked about was the war) - so it portrays a U.S. society that's very different from today's. Divorce was a social stigma, but (apparently) killing one's spouse was more socially acceptable. Claims adjusters accepted or rejected claims based on their "gut feelings", rather than a careful examination of the facts at hand.
I'll admit the plot is sufficiently twisty - almost overly twistly, but I guess not. By the end you might not know who exactly is taking advantage of whom, and maybe that the way it should be, and maybe that's what makes the film a classic, at least in its genre.
Huh, the novel this is based on was based on a real 1927 murder case, from Queens, NY, in which a woman persuaded her boyfriend to kill her husband, right after taking out a big insurance policy on his life - with, you guessed it, a double indemnity clause. I won't go into the production details over casting and filming here, but they're fun to read about, since the director had to work around the Hays code. This explains the over-use of weird metaphors in place of actual sexy talk, and the demand that justice in some form gets doled out to the guilty parties at the end.
Also starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Porter Hall, Jean Heather.
RATING: 6 out of 10 matchsticks
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