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Double Indemnity is a 1944 noir film directed by Billy Wilder that cast Fred McMurray as Walter Neff opposite the scheming femme fatale played by Barbara Stanwyck. The film dared to push the boundaries of the production Code designed to maintain the moral standards of the audience: Barbara first appears on screen in a towel, shoulders exposed, as she stares down from her lofty perch at her prey -- McMurray newly arrived to "house of death." Stanwyck's sensuality is used as a plot device to lure McMurray's Neff into her clutches, which involves a preposterous scheme of murder and money. The film explores the manner in which a good man can become embroiled in a bad situation -- that way is mainly exposed as the way of the flesh. Neff's seduction at the hands of Stanwyck sets off a chain of events that eventually leads to his fall (bleeding and waiting for the law to come for him) and Stanwyck's death (at his hands). The web of deceit that she weaves is her own undoing and the film suggests that playing with a man's emotions (and loyalty) is a good way to end up dead.As Boozer points out, "the sexual...
The femme fatale is, in fact, as old as the story of Adam and Eve and has its roots essentially in that same place -- the righteous and good Adam turning away from the law as a result Eve's charms. This same thematic device runs through Double Indemnity as Neff succumbs to Stanwyck's sexual charisma and allows himself to serve as her dupe. When he later takes his revenge by putting two slugs in her belly (a violent euphemistic twist on the sex act that would naturally end in procreation -- his depositing of his seed -- new life -- in her womb), the awful and tragic consequence of acting wrongly is spelled out plainly on the screen -- even if only suggestively (rather than graphically -- as would become typical in later decades when the industry Code would vanish). The physical acts of love that the two might have made together are instead violently disrupted in a painful climax that leaves both victims of one another's evil impulses bleeding -- one dead,…
Cain (afterward coupled by Mickey Spillane, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson) -- whose books were also recurrently tailored in films noir. In the vein of the novels, these films were set apart by a subdued atmosphere and realistic violence, and they presented postwar American cynicism to the extent of nihilism by presuming the total and hopeless corruption of society and of everyone in it. Billy Wilder's acidic Double Indemnity
Double Indemnity Scene Analysis Double Indemnity (1944) can be considered to be one of the films most representative of American film noir. Double Indemnity (1944) is the story of a woman, Phyllis Dietrichson, who has manipulated her way into marriage with a wealthy man, Mr. Dietrichson, and subsequently conspires with an insurance salesman, Walter Neff, to help kill her husband. Under the premise of being concerned for her husband's safety, Phyllis
Film Noir Among the various styles of producing films, it has been observed the noir style is one that has come to be recognized for its uniqueness in characterization, camera work and striking dialogue. Film Noir of the 1940s and 50s were quite well-known for their feminine characters that were the protagonists, the femme fatale. This was most common with the French, later accepted in the United States. There might have
Film Noir / Cinema Architecture Perhaps one of the most fruitful ways in which to trace the evolution of Film Noir as a genre is to examine, from the genre's heyday to the present moment, the metamorphoses of one of film noir's most reliable tropes: the femme fatale. The notion of a woman who is fundamentally untrustworthy -- and possibly murderous -- is a constant within the genre, perhaps as a
Memento as Film Noir Christopher Nolan's Memento as Film Noir Film noir rose to prominence in the late 1940s and was at first described as being "murder with a psychological twist (Spicer 1). Since the 1940s, the film noir genre has undergone a few changes, yet the central concepts of the genre remain the same. Christopher Nolan's 2000 film Memento is a neo-noir film that integrates many of the concepts found in
film noir movement by examining two films from the genre made at two different times within the movement. This will first mean looking at definitions of what classifies a film as noir and then looking at conventions of the movement such as: story, character and setting. This will explore how production value expresses the story and acts as an important filmic tool. The first movie to be discussed is