Looking over the schedule for Film Forum’s new series, Essential Wilder, I’m reminded not what a great director Billy Wilder was, but what a great screenwriter he was, a character creator. He said as much himself, that he was taught restraint as a director, to be unnoticed. “He should be invisible,” Wilder explained. “You should notice the characters.”
For instance, I don’t recall The Seven Year Itch so much as a whole as I do Marilyn Monroe’s character explaining that she prepares for hot summer days by keeping her “undies in the icebox.” And everyone, even those who haven’t seen the film, knows the iconic image of her white dress briefly lifted by a gust from a subway grate.
Wilder’s scripts are writerly, especially when you consider his fondness for scene-setting and character-establishing voiceovers. Here I’m thinking of a beyond-the-grave William Holden in Sunset Boulevard (“Funny, how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.”), Audrey Hepburn as the title character in Sabrina (“Once upon a time, on the north shore of Long Island, some 30 miles from New York, there lived a small girl on a large estate.”), and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment:
On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six-and-a-half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company, Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of uhh... Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor. Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.
Double Indemnity, which kicked off the Essential Wilder series tonight, uses a similar setup, but beginning at the end, with insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) shot in the chest and spilling his tale of fraud and murder into the Dictaphone at his desk.
He’s been crossed by the sly blonde Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), clear winner here of the Worst Wig Ever Award, who has charmed Neff into taking out a policy on her husband without his knowledge, then having Neff bump off the guy. Neff’s a cad himself; they banter and gambol sexually in the confines of Hays Code prudishness and the number of times he refers to Dietrichson as “baby” are as irritating as his dead monotone throughout. He’s quick to leap into the scheme and a relationship with her, but he’s unaware she’s been suspected of murder previously, a hidden fact that eventually fouls his best-laid plans.
Being in the business of exposing rackets like the one he’s perpetrating, Neff formulates his scheme meticulously. What he doesn’t count on are the insights of his boss, Barton Keyes (the sparky Edward G. Robinson), who chips away at Neff’s resolve through clever reasoning. Keyes’ own boss has a misguided pet theory that the death was a suicide and the scene in which Keyes literately and speedily punctures his argument while telling him off as a front-office buffoon who’s never read an actuarial table, is the best in the movie; people at my screening applauded it. Just as Keyes has all but pegged Neff as Dietrichson’s partner in crime, relations sour between the two criminals. Neff unwisely tries to pin the racket on her in a last ditch attempt to save himself. Too bad he didn’t know about that gun of hers.
Double Indemnity is classic film noir, steeped in sex, murder and double-crosses, spiced with the dark humor that’s Wilder’s trademark.