This week's Classic American Film: "Double Indemnity" (1944)

directed by Billy Wilder

starring Barbara Stanwyck Fred MacMurray, and Edward G Robinson

Before David Fincher and the Coen Brothers, there was "film noir". . . .

“film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style” --Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir”

"Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked. There was nothing to give us away. And yet, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it's true, so help me. I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man. That was the longest night I ever lived through..."

--Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray)

Walter Neff works for the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company. One unlucky day he crosses paths with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a dame with an ankle bracelet, a lot of attitude, and a rich husband she'd like to knock off and collect the life insurance. To get "double indemnity," it's got to look like a train accident. . . To get Walter into the spider's web of a love affair/murder plot with Phyllis, it doesn't take much at all. . . .

Based on a hard-boiled potboiler novel by James M. Cain, "Double Indemnity" is considered one of the first, and one of the greatest, of the "film noir" genre that emerged in American following World War II.