August 28, 2024

barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review

Words by STEPHEN MERCHANT


In 1944, director Billy Wilder released the quintessential film noir before the term even existed. Double Indemnity bears all the hallmarks of the genre: wiseass repartee; crisp black-and-white cinematography; a manipulative femme fatale twisting a lust-fuelled sap around her finger; shards of light pouring through venetian blinds casting prison-bar shadows across the faces of our amoral protagonists as they hurtle towards a doomed comeuppance. 

This is no spoiler. The movie opens at night (it’s noir, of course it’s night) with a wounded man driving his coupe through downtown LA, staggering to his office, and dictating a confession to his colleague: ‘Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance agent, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars… until a little while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.’ 

barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Pictures/Filmgrab
barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Pictures/Filmgrab

From here, flashbacks show Neff (Fred MacMurray) falling for the glamorous but unhappily married Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Together they concoct a devilishly clever plan to bump off Phyllis’ husband for his accident insurance money, only to come under the suspicious gaze of Neff’s friend and colleague, insurance investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). 

Double Indemnity is an early example of a ‘whydunnit’, telling us the killer’s identity upfront (a narrative technique popularised 30 years later by TV’s Columbo), but is it the first thriller to make us root for a bad guy driven by greed and sex? Unclear, but certainly that opening narration sets the blackly comic tone that pervades the film, in which brief early scenes of sunny LA give way to ever more darkening shadows as our conniving pair descend into murder and betrayal. 

The movie was based on a novella by hardboiled crime writer James M. Cain, who as a journalist had attended the trial of a woman and her lover convicted of a similar murder in the 1920s. 

barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Picture/Filmgrab

Wilder’s regular screenwriting collaborator Charles Brackett declined to adapt the book, regarding it as too scandalous and immoral, so Wilder famously hired master crime author Raymond Chandler, creator of the archetypal gumshoe Philip Marlowe. Chandler assumed that writing a film would be quick and easy, taking maybe three weeks. When he was told his weekly rate was $750, he thought he could stretch it out to four. As described by Maurice Zolotow in his biography Billy Wilder in Hollywood: ‘[Chandler] schlepped it in five weeks later. Billy read it at once while Chandler watched. Then he threw it – yes, hurled it – right at Chandler. It hit him in the chest and fell on his lap. “This is shit, Mr. Chandler,” he said amiably. He suggested that Chandler use it as a doorstop.’

Their relationship went downhill from there, with Chandler battling alcoholism and Wilder every step of the way. Nevertheless, their Oscar- nominated screenplay is a triumph, cleverly refining and reworking the novella while injecting Chandler’s trademark wit and smart-alec crosstalk. Take Phyllis and Walter’s flirty first encounter, fizzing with innuendo to dodge the censor’s red pencil: 


PHYLLIS: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour. 

NEFF: How fast was I going, officer? 

PHYLLIS: I’d say about ninety. 

NEFF: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket. 

PHYLLIS: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time. 

NEFF: Suppose it doesn’t take. 

PHYLLIS: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles. 

NEFF: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder. 


PHYLLIS: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.


As a film and TV writer, I know full well that good dialogue is only as good as the actors delivering it, and Stanwyck and MacMurray are faultless, loading every line with just the right amount of sexy snark, Fred grinning an insouciant smirk, Barbara fighting the urge to do the same. 

Years later, movies like Basic Instinct would make these seduction scenes explicit, but in 1940s Hollywood every erotic beat had to be carefully calibrated to sneak past America’s moral guardians. It was racy enough that Stanwyck first appears at the top of a staircase in a towel; moments later, Wilder’s camera fixates on her anklet as she descends in what were scripted as ‘pom-pom slippers’ – signifiers that despite her nice suburban home, Phyllis (in Wilder’s words) is showy and trashy. It’s the reason the director made Stanwyck wear a cheap blonde wig, which is constantly distracting once you realise it’s a piece. As one studio executive who hated the wig apparently stated: “We hire Barbara Stanwyck and we get George Washington.’ 

barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Picture/Filmgrab
barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Picture/Filmgrab

For a city that seems to have little reverence for its historical buildings, I take great pleasure in discovering (via Google maps) that the exterior of the Dietrichson residence, a Spanish Colonial Revival-style house in the Hollywood hills, has changed very little since it starred in the movie almost 80 years ago. If Double Indemnity is a thoroughbred film noir, it’s also a Los Angeles movie to its core, partly thanks to its locations – including the Hollywood & Western Building and the Hollywood Bowl – but also because every frame seems soaked in the sweat and humidity, cynicism and paranoia, of the big city. 

Neff’s North Kingsley Drive apartment block is still standing too, the setting for one of the finest suspense scenes in any movie. Neff receives a late-night visit from Keyes, whose ‘little man’ in his stomach keeps telling him something is amiss with the Dietrichson insurance claim. Oblivious, Phyllis is on her way up to the apartment, but if she encounters Keyes, the murder conspiracy will be blown wide open. She is about to enter Neff’s apartment as Keyes is leaving, but at the last moment ducks behind Neff’s apartment door, which inexplicably opens outwards into the corridor. No apartment door has ever done this in the history of construction, but it’s testament to the movie’s immersive, slow-burning suspense that you don’t even register it on first, second or fiftieth watch. 

At the 17th Academy Awards, Double Indemnity was rightly nominated for seven Oscars but wrongly won none. Wilder was apparently so furious about losing Best Director to Leo McCarey for the mawkish Going My Way that as McCarey walked to the stage, Wilder tripped him up. It’s the perfect coda for a movie that not only trips up but snaps the neck of the polite mores and suburban civilities that America was trying to sell itself in the 1940s; a movie that only an émigré like Wilder, having escaped the horrors of the Nazis, could so gleefully use to expose the dark, irredeemable recesses of human behaviour; a movie that in 2024, an election year in which politicians would have us believe there was once a golden age in which America was happy and bright, reminds us the country has always been merrily, deliciously dark.

barbara stanwyck, billy wilder, double indemnity, fred macmurray, raymond chandler, hollywood authentic, review
Double Indemnity © Paramount Picture/Filmgrab

Double Indemnity (1944) Paramount  Pictures directed by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Available on YouTube

Words by ALEX BILMES


Some films haunt us, obsess us, change our lives for having experienced them… This issue, the editor-in-chief of British Esquire extols the spellbinding virtues of Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 bittersweet modern classic.

Through the lens of a lesser director than the Hong Kong Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love might have been somewhat slight, and more than a little contrived. A newspaper journalist, Mr Chow, and a travel agent’s secretary, Mrs Chan, take separate rooms on the same floor of a cramped apartment block. They move in on the same day. Coincidence! Or, coincidence? Both are married to people who are often absent: Mrs Chan’s husband travels frequently to Japan on business; Mr Chow’s wife does shift work, so they are rarely at home at the same time. (Everyone in the film is defined – though, crucially, not everyone is confined – by their marital status.) Both Mr and Mrs are reticent, contained, solitary. They’re also both off-the-charts attractive, but we’ll come to that later.

in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic
in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic

Slowly, tentatively, first with glances and smiles, then halting, stiffly polite snatches of conversation, they come to know each other – and soon to discover something surprising. Mrs Chan’s husband is cheating on her, with Mr Chow’s wife.

‘By the way, haven’t seen your husband lately.’

‘Haven’t seen your wife lately, either.’

Not a terrible set-up for a movie. But hardly, you might think, the raw material for the most luscious unconsummated romance ever depicted on screen, a film as chaste as Brief Encounter, and yet also a gorgeous swoon of a work, one that has become regarded by critics and discerning audiences as perhaps the most hauntingly affecting love story ever made. 

When Sight & Sound announced the results of its most recent poll, in 2022, asking movie insiders to nominate the greatest films of all time (the list, published once a decade, is not definitive, but it is highly influential and hotly debated – and has been since its debut in 1952), In the Mood for Love placed at number five. It came below Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) – and above every other film ever made anywhere or at any time. Quite good, then. Akerman’s victory was unexpected, but few cineastes were especially surprised that Wong’s masterpiece ranked so high. The film is by now an established classic, one of the wonders of world cinema. 

in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic
in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic

I rewatch it every year and it loses none of its erotic charge. It is a film that takes nostalgia as one of its themes, and it is impossible to think of it without succumbing to an indulgent melancholy, a yearning for times past. When it ends, you want to go back to the start and relive it, like an old, unresolved love affair. 

The film opens, mysteriously, with an epigraph:
He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

A second title card informs us we are in Hong Kong, in 1962. ‘A restless moment.’ Then we’re inside the cluttered apartment of Mrs Suen, a good-natured busybody, where a slender figure in a tight floral-print dress with a pinched waist and high cowl collar – which clashes appealingly with the floral-print curtains and the floral-print lamp shade – is being shown around, with a view to renting a room. This is Mrs Chan. It is evening. She has come straight from work. The building has seen better days. It is dimly lit, the walls are stained, the wallpaper is peeling. All this in stark contrast to the appearance of Mrs Chan herself. 

Where to start? As embodied by the actress Maggie Cheung, she is dazzlingly, heart-meltingly beautiful. A delicate, willowy young woman with supremely expressive, intelligent eyes and a face that catches the light from any angle. And Wong knows how to shoot her: tight, close, his roving camera placed at knee-height, hip-height, the better to follow her as she moves, to appreciate the contours of her shape. 

‘You notice things if you pay attention,’ Mrs Chan says at one point. Wong’s camera notices everything: steam from a kettle, a spoon stirring a cup of tea, a billowing red curtain, the way plumes of cigarette smoke hang in the air, rain-slicked streets, the fogged windows of a taxi cab at night, the particular shade of lime on a dress. He shoots interiors like a spy, lingering briefly on a detail, moving on. We in the audience feel ourselves to be inside the frame. Not merely voyeurs – although certainly that, too – but silent participants in the action. We, too, are falling in love.

in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, 2000, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic

Next shot: seen from behind, in shadow, a man climbs a shabby staircase. He arrives into a corridor and steps into the light. Get a load of this guy: matinee-idol handsome, hair slicked back, immaculate silk shantung suit, crisp white shirt, tie. But there’s something mournful about him, something wounded, a vulnerability. It’s intriguing, and it’s sexy. Mr Chow is played by the great Tony Leung, that most understated of leading men, and perhaps only he could have the magnetism to share a screen with the exquisite Maggie Cheung and not vaporise under her flashbulb glare. 

OK, so now we’re sold. Spellbound. Who cares about the script or the plot when we can spend the next 90 minutes in the company of these two heavenly creatures? When we can stare at Tony Leung smoking in the rain, or Maggie Cheung sauntering in slow motion through the soupy humidity of a crumbling, crepuscular city. When we can listen to the composer Michael Galasso’s aching score for cello, and to the languorous, enveloping sound of Nat King Cole singing ‘Quizas, Quizas, Quizas’. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic
in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic

But In the Mood for Love, for all the aesthetic bliss it offers, is more than a superficial exercise in atmospheric filmmaking. It is a study in longing and desire and a meditation on time, loss and regret. In its surface is its depth. 

As the plot thickens, the film becomes more dreamlike, impressionistic. It gets stranger and stranger. Mrs Chan and Mr Chow begin to roleplay their spouses’ infidelity. At a restaurant, he orders what her husband might have had, she wonders what his wife would eat. He takes her hand and asks if they should stay out all night. But her husband would never say that, so they play the scene again. This time she makes the first move, simpering a little. It’s a dangerous game. 

‘I didn’t think you’d fall in love with me.’

‘I didn’t either.’

He’s moving to Singapore. They rehearse a final farewell. She cries on his shoulder. Who knew it would hurt so much?

Will she go with him? Is it too late? Have they missed their chance? Will their affair, if that’s what this is, ever be consummated?

in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic
in the mood for love, wong kar-wai, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung man-yuk, alex bilmes, hollywood authentic

I won’t tell you that part in case you haven’t seen it. Enough to say that the film’s final, peripatetic, time-skipping sequences are gripping, tender and devastating.

In the Mood for Love is, loosely, the second part of a trilogy, beginning with Days of Being Wild (1990) and ending with 2046 (2004). Both those films have much to recommend them but neither comes close to the power and potency of Wong’s masterpiece. But then nothing does, and none of the cast or crew – cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Pun-Leung Kwan and Ping Bin Lee; production designer/costume designer/film editor William Chang; composer Galasso – for all their many decorations and achievements, would ever work again on a movie so enduring and beloved.

‘That era has passed,’ reads a title at the end. ‘Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.’ 


Images courtesy of BLOCK 2 PICTURES/JET TONE CONTENTS
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