4K UHD Review: Billy Wilder’s Noir Classic Double Indemnity on the Criterion Collection

Near the opening of Double Indemnity, a ruined man named Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) walks into an insurance office nestled in the top floor of a Los Angeles building late at night. Moving with obvious purpose, and clearly hiding something underneath the jacket that loosely hangs on his shoulders, Walter pauses for a moment along the office’s corridors. He looks down to survey the vast rows of empty desks that are utilized, presumably, by insurance agents.

This is among the film’s most moving episodes, at least once we know what’s going on with Walter. In this context, those endless rows of desks suggest a reassuring normalcy, redolent of lives spent in adherence to routines that people often resent until they’re in dire straits. For Walter, a life once perhaps seen as a trap becomes a lost island. Characteristic of Billy Wilder’s allergy to platitude, this scene lasts but a few seconds.

Resonant on contemporary rewatch is Double Indemnity’s governing obsession with the interwoven freedoms and constrictions of wealthy society. A scrappy European journalist who might’ve just missed the Holocaust (which took many in his family), who became a profoundly wealthy and respected American screenwriter and filmmaker, Wilder had the experience to observe such societies from top to bottom. With that artistic perspective comes a terror—of destruction, instability, loss—as well as a resentment of the gilded class that he joined.

These somewhat contradictory feelings often manifest themselves in Wilder’s films as lacerating humor. Though Double Indemnity is based on the 1943 novel of the same name by James M. Cain, it’s hard to miss the qualities that unite Walter with Wilder and future Wilder protagonists: Many of them are enterprisers looking to break out of perceived cages, generally of poverty and ill repute, and enter the big league of their chosen racket. Usually, though, they find themselves trapped in more constricting and dangerous cages.

The rows of perfectly aligned desks in Double Indemnity suggest a German expressionist effect, one that was reprised more emphatically by Wilder in The Apartment. In the latter, though, the mixed feelings of nostalgia and regret have been pared away, as the desks are an unambiguous embodiment of conformity, perpetuated by people in order to make a living, which the protagonist manages to escape by embracing love. The sweetness of that beloved movie has always felt forced—the willfully oblivious inverse of the more nuanced, more ambivalent sourness that ran through Wilder films such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Ace in the Hole. Love never occurs to Walter. Befitting his profession, he’s a man fixed on figures, percentages, and flimflam, and that’s his downfall: Walter plans a perfect murder-slash-insurance fraud that allows for everything except human eccentricity.

Did Walter ever see his office as a trap though? Maybe benignly, though to even allow for this explanation is to risk pigeonholing a movie that’s gloriously rich in unexpected and irresolvable emphases. Walter’s nostalgia for the desk at the start of the film, when he’s near his own end, feels more real than other frustrations he alludes to. A routine crime film might assign Walter the motivation of malaise, while Double Indemnity allows him to enjoy tomcatting in a sales job rich in double talk. Like any salesman worth a damn, Walter is high on his own bullshit, which MacMurray conveys with a sly, curdled vanity. Sure, Walter wants more money, but he’s a wandering atom who requires the charge of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to set him in destructive motion. However, the murder he eventually plans and commits isn’t truly motivated by money or even by lust for Phyllis, but daddy issues. Walter wants to prove he can outwit his boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), who has a ruthless eye for subterfuge that hides a heartbreaking well of sentimentality.

These resonances aren’t explicitly discussed by the characters in the screenwriterly speeches that glut many contemporary films. Wilder and co-screenwriter Raymond Chandler establish a dense emotional infrastructure of euphemisms and symbols. In the case of Walter and Keyes, the guarded affection of their relationship is encapsulated by Keyes’s goading of Walter, rooted in love, respect, and a desire to see his surrogate son grow more ambitious, and by Walter’s willingness to light Keyes’s cigars, always with a match that he strikes with his thumb.

That thumb strike, a cocky, gimmicky gesture of style within a legitimate act of fealty and admiration, is Walter in a nutshell. In Double Indemnity’s astonishing final moment, this gesture is reversed: Walter strikes a match for a cigarette that he’s too wounded to steady, and Keyes takes it for him and lights the cigarette, bringing a relationship to its close. Another ritual is pointedly reversed earlier: The first time Walter tells Keyes that he loves him, it’s coated in breezy facetiousness, but the second time is sincere, stripped of Walter’s defenses.

By contrast, the relationship between Walter and Phyllis abounds in the florid diamond-hard dialogue for which Wilder and Chandler were famous. (Little of Cain’s dialogue was used.) Best known, of course, is the scene in which Walter hits on the very married Phyllis as soon as they meet, and the audacity of his pitch is described as a breach of the speed limit. This moment is foreplay; sex arrives in the murder of Phyllis’s husband (Tom Powers), as Walter strangles the man from behind the passenger seat of his own car off screen, his screams resounding over a close-up of Phyllis’s ecstatic face as she drives. Sex manifests as violence once again when Walter kills Phyllis, drawing her close in his most overtly passionate contact with her, and shooting her in the stomach—a literalization of penetration.

Yet Walter and Phyllis’s relationship is subject to another of Double Indemnity’s peculiar and fascinating emphases. Despite the film’s understandable reputation as one of the mountaintops upon which any practitioner of noir must attempt to scale—an idea suggested by Brian De Palma in the first scene from Femme Fatale—it resists the self-pitying idea of sex with a dangerous woman as the ultimate doom awaiting a suggestibly amoral man. Business, the scam itself, is the true sex for Walter, who rarely seems to lose control of his bearings, and the money is the real booty for Phyllis, proof of vengeance exacted with perfect mercilessness.

Compared to Howard Hawks’s positively horny adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity revels in a hothouse paranoia that’s startlingly, well, bureaucratic. Walter and Phyllis quickly tire of each other, particularly when their union threatens the scam, which Wilder outlines with a chilliness and shrewdness of detail that should please any insurance actuary. Double Indemnity is a ruthless and poignant cornucopia of the details that command our lives, from insurance figures to office politics to romantic rituals to shopping trips, and Walter punctures the social fabric that emboldens and contains us. Adrift, awaiting either death or a literal cage, Walter comes to long for the figurative one, the routine social constriction that many of us accept as a given.

Image/Sound

This package includes a 4K Blu-ray as well as a Blu-ray sourced from a new 4K restoration. The difference between the two discs isn’t as stark as you may imagine, as both look and sound absolutely superb. The 4K may have more sumptuous blacks, though the blacks in the regular Blu-ray also seem to be capable of swallowing you alive. Whites are well-balanced in each case, which has been tricky for home-video presentations of Double Indemnity in the past, as facial close-ups have been shrilly bright. Grain is healthy and well-rounded, and is noticeable in close-ups and shots of vividly dusty homes and offices. Meanwhile, clarity is simply astounding, offering a dance of light and shadow that’s imbued with a docudramatic sense of detail. Soundtracks are clear and nuanced in both cases, offering immersive soundstages. Difficult to imagine a better presentation of this film in the near future.

Extras

In a new feature produced this year, critics and noir experts Eddie Muller and Imogen Sara Smith discuss Double Indemnity’s various themes as well as its potential status as the first true American noir. Most memorably, they observe the vivid elements of the film’s production design, especially the grocery store where Walter and Phyllis rendezvous, as it’s satirically rife with canned and prepackaged food that suggest conformity and artificiality. In another new feature produced for Criterion, film scholar Noah Isenberg discusses Billy Wilder’s formative journalistic experience in Europe and the rise of his film career in America. Both supplements are sharp and astute, offering an abundance of context within trim running times.

On the archival front, a short 2006 documentary, “Shadows of Suspense,” includes interviews with writer James Ellroy, filmmaker William Friedkin, and critic Kim Newman, among others. This piece features fascinating anecdotes about Wilder’s collaboration with Raymond Chandler on the Double Indemnity screenplay, and how it deviated from the novel. Cain’s dialogue was considered great on the page but unworkable as spoken by people, and so Wilder tapped into Chandler’s florid poetry even though they couldn’t stand one another.

For a deeper dive into all the material covered by these documentaries, listen to critic Richard Schickel’s affectionate, informative 2006 audio commentary. There’s also Volker Schlöndorff and Gisela Grischow’s three-hour television documentary from 1992, Billy Wilder: How Did You Do It?, which covers Wilder’s life and work in epic detail. Rounding out a very solid package are two vintage radio play adaptations of Double Indemnity, the theatrical trailer, and a leaflet featuring an essay by critic Angelica Jade Bastién.

Overall

With this stunning 4K UHD release, Criterion ushers one of Billy Wilder’s finest, darkest, and most influential films fully into the 21st century.