![]() ![]() “I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim,” Cain once observed of his writing, “or any of the things I am usually called. Double Indemnity presents a ruthless saga of betrayal, in which the most unredeemable sins are those the characters commit against themselves. ![]() In 125 unrelenting pages, Cain not only indicts middle-class greed and shallowness, he also paints a considerably darker portrait of a man and a woman consumed by their desires. And then there’s this: The novel on which it is based, the second book by James M. In the first place, it’s a quintessential Los Angeles narrative-moody, atmospheric, shot (some of it, in any case) on location in the city, beginning with that opening sequence, Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, mid-thirties, insurance salesman on the make, at the tail end of a murder plot that has come undone (how could it not?), driving frantically down Wilshire Boulevard toward the confessional of his mentor’s Dictaphone. ![]() For the last few years, I’ve made a point of showing Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir Double Indemnity to my students at the University of Southern California. ![]()
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