On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder introduces his hero as an inadvertent survivor, a man who finds himself alive without reason. The sequence in which he is introduced is so breathtakingly beautiful that the art actually threatens to overwhelm the revelation of character, a rarity in Wilder’s career. These are shots of extraordinary, luminous despair: a man staggers into consciousness, climbs halfway out the turret, passes out in the brilliant sun, is hurled from the tank when the vehicle tips over the crest of a dune, and snaps back into consciousness just in time to see the tank rolling away, leaving him alone in the scorching desert. Wilder presents this awful realization in a shot of the soldier lying on a bed of wavy, furrowed, burning sand. He cuts on action as the worn-out man gets up and starts desperately running, the intense sun rendering him simply as a silhouette racing along the deep black tracks of the tank, stumbling, and finally collapsing in the heat as the tank recedes into the distance. When the man stops moving, Wilder cuts to a medium shot of him lying faceup, exhausted, at which point he tracks forward to an intense close-up of the soldier’s dog tag on his bare chest: “747289 J. J. Bramble.” Only in this moment of utter futility does Wilder give his character an identity.

  Wilder’s three main supporting players—Akim Tamiroff as the hotel owner Farid, Anne Baxter as the chambermaid Mouche, and Peter Van Eyck as the Nazi Lieutenant Schwegler—each turn in performances as workmanlike as Tone’s. Tamiroff’s Farid begins as pure caricature but, through timing and nuance, grows into a somewhat more complex personality. Oily and obsequious, he plays the fool—specifically, the Arab fool. Schwegler, interrogating him when the Nazis storm into Sidi Halfaya, asks if he’s Egyptian. Farid replies, grovelingly, “Oh yes, sir, only because my parents were Egyptian, sir.” Schwegler then asks if he has a wife. “Oh yes, sir, yes, but she ran away.” “With the British to Alexandria?” “No, sir—with a Greek to Casablanca.”

  As for Schwegler, he’s a model of athletic Aryan splendor and is thus not to be trusted. The fact that he is a Nazi hardly stops Billy from giving him some plum lines, not the least of which is Schwegler’s explanation of the Germans’ standards as guests of Farid’s hotel: “Our complaints are brief. We make them against the nearest wall.”

  Anne Baxter, as Mouche, is more problematic. A gracious, delicately featured actress, Baxter appears to better effect in Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, made and released the year before Five Graves. In Ambersons, in which she plays an American nouvelle aristocrat, her lofty, rather brittle nature makes more sense than it does in a decrepit Egyptian hotel. (In the 1950 All About Eve, the role of Baxter’s career, her built-in smugness speaks for itself.) In Five Graves she’s also saddled with a French accent that limits her expressive range further than necessary. She executes the accent passably enough, but her rs are even worse than Marlene Dietrich’s, a habit that leads to unintentional comedy when she has to pronounce such phrases as “when the Bwitish decided to evacuate theiw twoops.” Since Mouche is defining and explaining the basis of her cynical, opportunistic character at that moment, the accent is particularly self-defeating.

  More damagingly, Wilder asks Anne Baxter to play a role that requires a moral transformation, but as he and Brackett write it, the metamorphosis is a little too shallow and one-sided. Mouche’s explanation for why she is in Sidi Halfaya to begin with rings false. What she says is true—there are many French chambermaids in France but only one in Sidi Halfaya—but that does not explain why the one in Sidi Halfaya chooses to stay there. Initially, Mouche has no trouble welcoming the Nazis into the hotel and her bedroom, serving them as she would any other guests from whom favors might be required. She is pragmatic, selfish, ambitious, hardened; these are traits many Wilder characters would bear in the years to come. To soften her, Brackett and Wilder give her moral indignation; righteously (but wrongly), she blames the British for abandoning French troops—including her own brothers—on the beach at Dunkirk. According to Mouche, they were left “wading out into the water, begging the British to come back for them. Did the British come back? Did they?” Bramble, angry but embarrassed, remains silent. Mouche continues: “I’m only a chambermaid. But if somebody rings for me I come—if it’s only a towel they want, or an extra pillow. Not life.”

  In fact, however, the problem Wilder himself has with Mouche owes to her sex: when somebody rings for her, she comes, and she doesn’t care who it is or what they want. For Wilder, when a man whores himself he gets contempt and empathy in equal measure—Fred MacMurray’s character in Double Indemnity; John Lund’s in A Foreign Affair; Kirk Douglas’s in Ace in the Hole; William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. They may be callous opportunists, but they’re men. When a woman takes the same course, she’s more contemptible. “I don’t like women in the morning,” Rommel barks at her at one point. It’s a sentiment with which Wilder commiserates.

  And she pays for it. In one of the film’s most unnerving moments, Rommel whips her across the face with his riding crop. Mouche has, by that point, redeemed herself as a moral character, but for Wilder, there is still a touch of pleasure in seeing her punished with a whack across the face. After all, she turns against the Nazis only because Schwegler fibs. At first, she is perfectly happy to sleep with him. (The only reason she doesn’t is that Joseph Breen would never have approved it.) When Schwegler winds up dead and Mouche learns of his deception—he’s lied to her about his ability to get her wounded brother out of a German concentration camp, and he does so just to get into her pants—Brackett and Wilder resolve her character’s amorality promptly by setting her up to be killed. First Rommel lashes her; then he sends her before a firing squad. Wilder knows that Mouche is more emotionally resonant dead than alive. He is hardly alone in this practice. In Hollywood, sacrificial women have always been more tolerable than those whose heroism assumes a more dynamic nature.

  At the end of the film, Bramble speaks to her grave: “Don’t worry, Mouche. We’re after them now. When you feel the earth shake, that’ll be our tanks and our guns and our lorries. Thousands and thousands of them—British, French, and American. We’re after them now, coming from all sides. We’re going to blast the blazes out of them.” It is a stirring enough speech, but nothing unusual. In 1942 and 1943, screenwriters from one end of Los Angeles to the other were outdoing themselves in patriotic rhetoric, and they were all encouraged and approved by the Office of War Information. The public liked it, too; like many war films, Five Graves sold well. But ultimately, what makes Five Graves to Cairo endure is not its effective wartime propaganda but its brutal lyricism—the hard reflections of light glaring on people’s eyes, the latticed shadows of screens sending them into shades of gray and black, the absorbing tensions of an average guy caught behind the eight ball. These themes found even richer illustration in Wilder’s next film, when he shifted his sights back home to Southern California.

  12. DOUBLE INDEMNITY

  PHYLLIS: (describing her dull marriage to an older man) So I just sit and knit.

  WALTER: That what you married him for?

  PHYLLIS: Maybe I like the way his thumbs hold up the wool.

  WALTER: (grinning) Anytime his thumbs get tired…. (leering) Only with me around you wouldn’t have to knit.

  PHYLLIS: Wouldn’t I?

  WALTER: Bet your life you wouldn’t.

  —Double Indemnity

  On October 16, 1944, a Mrs. Dreyfuss of 1235 N. Sweetzer Avenue, Los Angeles, California, placed a telephone call to Paramount Pictures. She was very upset. Paramount had used her telephone number in their recent film Double Indemnity, they’d done so without her permission, and what were they going to do about it? Mrs. Dreyfuss appeared to want to make some sort of financial settlement with the studio to soothe her jangled nerves. But one of Paramount’s executives had a little man inside of him, an inner voice that alerted him to trouble, and he felt that something wasn’t right about Mrs. Dreyfuss’s claim. After checking the film’s copious preproduction records and making inquiries with the telephone company, P
aramount’s investigators learned that the phone number had been given to Mrs. Dreyfuss on July 18, 1944; that she had personally requested that her old number be changed to the new number; and that she had requested this change four days after a preview screening of Double Indemnity.

  Double Indemnity is a film about scams—financial scams, moral scams, erotic scams. It’s about the lengths human beings will go to in trying to get what we want. It’s about what we want and how we get it—the lies we tell, the murderous impulses we harbor, the sexual drives that compel us to act like the rutting beasts we wish we weren’t. It’s about desire and greed. It’s also about guilt: the little voices inside us, the little men—for some of us, the little women—who try very hard to keep our own animal instincts in check, all the while remaining alert to the deceits and compulsions of others. Double Indemnity teaches us that we must listen to these little voices or else we’ll slide into murder and ruin. But Double Indemnity also teaches us that if we do listen to these voices all the time, if we let them kill our instincts, then we’ll end up bitter and alone. To the extent that Double Indemnity is a parable, its moral allows not only the price to be paid for crime but also the price extracted by civilized morality. This film is one of the most finely crafted in world cinema, a fact not lost on its director. Billy knew it was good when he made it. He began one day of shooting by announcing to his cast and crew, “Keep it quiet! After all, history is being made.”

  Wilder says offhandedly that he’d thought about doing a musical instead, but then he saw the popular Cover Girl: “I realized that no matter how good my musical would be, most people would say it was no Cover Girl. This Double Indemnity looked like a better chance to set Hollywood back on its heels.” Indeed, among the first Hollywood heels rocked back by Billy’s drive to film Double Indemnity were those belonging to Charlie Brackett, who refused to have anything to do with such seedy, inflammatory filth.

  By 1943, Double Indemnity had sustained its reputation as an unfilmable property for eight years. The problem was simple: his name was Will Hays. In 1935, when James M. Cain wrote the novel, his agent sent a copy to MGM. Cain’s agent began hearing from other producers who wanted to read it, and soon all five major studios were interested. Then, according to Cain, “the Hays Office knocked it in the head. I didn’t see its letter, but was told it was an uncompromising ban of the story in toto, one of those things that begin ‘under no circumstances’ and wind up ‘way shape or form.’ The main objection was that the story in part was a ‘blueprint’ for murder, that it would show them how to kill for profit. That it would also show them how to wind up behind the eight ball was not mentioned. Double Indemnity was then sold to Liberty, getting an enthusiastic reception from the magazine’s readers, with no reports of any murders having been committed as a result.”

  In 1943, when the story was about to be published in book form, Cain’s agent sent advance copies of it to the studios again, and Paramount quickly became interested on Wilder’s behalf. Cain read the Hays Office’s report this time: “It was perhaps as stupid a document as I ever read—for it made not the slightest effort to ascertain whether the picture could be filmed with the changes commonly made in a novel when it is prepared for the screen. But Wilder, Dozier, and Sistrom (studio executives) are not easily frightened men, and they decided to make a try at it.”

  According to Cain, Wilder’s interest in Double Indemnity had been long-standing, but in fact it didn’t come to Billy’s attention until 1943, when it was reprinted and published in the collection Three of a Kind. The story is that one of Brackett and Wilder’s secretaries wasn’t at her desk one morning, and when Billy asked where she was, another secretary told him, “I think she’s still in the ladies’ room reading that story.” “What story?” said Billy. The first secretary then emerged from the bathroom with the bound galleys of Double Indemnity.

  Brackett and Wilder’s secretary may have been entertained by Cain’s tale of lust and murder, but Brackett himself responded with pure disgust. If Billy wanted to make a movie out of such a distasteful book, Charlie announced, he would have to make it without Charlie. A film adaptation of Double Indemnity called for an unusual blend of finesse and vulgarity, narrative grace and sexual sewage. Some of Brackett’s disdain for the property was likely due to the residual contempt he held for the low-class, thoroughly riveting journalism that accompanied the true-crime story on which Cain based Double Indemnity—the infamous Snyder/Gray murder, which occurred in New York in the late 1920s. At the time, Brackett was a mandarin scribe penning arts criticism for the New Yorker and hightoned novels about the upper class. New York’s tabloids, meanwhile, were inflaming the mass audience with lurid details about a cheap, bungled murder in one of the outer boroughs. Albert and Ruth Snyder, of 222nd Street in Queens Village, had lived in their suburban-style, single-family house for four and a half years. Albert Snyder was a run-of-the-mill art editor for Motorboating magazine. Ruth Snyder was a housewife who was lately screwing a salesman for the Bien Joli Corset Company on the side. Ruth was a plain-faced woman with blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and a prominent square jaw. She’d tried to kill Albert earlier and failed, though her attempt completely escaped Albert’s awareness. Then she met the corset salesman, whose name was Judd Gray.

  A bespectacled, mealy sort of adulterer, Gray was thirty-five years old and lived with his wife and child in New Jersey. He called Ruth “Momsie” and had sex with her in her Queens Village bedroom, though sometimes they met in a hotel, where Ruth’s nine-year-old daughter sat waiting patiently in the lobby while the couple screwed upstairs. This was clearly not territory with which Charles Brackett cared to become more familiar, even in retrospect. Damon Runyon, who covered the trial for the New York American, described the two killers: “A chilly-looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble you-bet-you-will chins, and an inert, scaredrunk fellow that you couldn’t miss among any hundred men as a dead set-up for a blonde, or the shell game, or maybe a gold brick—on trial for what might be called for want of a better name: the Dumb-bell Murder. It was so dumb!” Runyon was right. Ruth and Judd were very messy. They bashed Albert on the head with an iron window-sash weight, after which they chloroformed him. Then they strangled him with a length of picture wire just to make sure. The inept Gray bought the sash weight in front of witnesses who later identified him. He also made the mistake of involving a third party in the murder—a friend from Syracuse who was supposed to vouch for Gray’s whereabouts and provide substantiation for his alibi. Gray went to Syracuse the day before the murder, came back to New York, whacked, poisoned, and choked Albert to death, and then returned to Syracuse, where he made his accomplice do the work of destroying the bloodstained clothes. As soon as the friend was questioned by the police he confessed his role in the crime.

  The ugliness and stupidity of the Albert-Gray killing juiced up the public’s morbid imagination. The murder weapons were put on display at the New York Police Academy, where they drew a large crowd of admirers. The trial itself was quite a sensation. Ruth tended to show up at court wearing mourning black and a crucifix, and so much of her testimony provoked such derisive laughter from the assembled onlookers that the judge repeatedly had to tell them to shut up. Albert was said at the trial to have been abusive, but the jury didn’t much care; such testimony did not stop them from convicting the sad-sack couple in short order. New York was spellbound. But as appealing as the story of the bumbling murderers’ conviction was, it paled next to their exciting executions. Photographer Thomas Howard of the Daily News even managed to snap a picture of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair at the precise moment that the jolt of electricity ripped through her body. Howard had strapped a small camera to his leg and concealed it under his pants. At the moment of electrocution he pulled his pant leg up and took the shot. It was, as the Daily News modestly described it, “the most remarkable exclusive picture in the history of criminology.”

  As a novelist, Cain was inspired not only by the sordid murde
r and trial but by the sustained frissons of delight with which the public greeted it. His book is a model of guilt and glory, horror and desire. His readers experience, however vicariously, the double thrill of snapping a man’s neck and then gorging on all the fear and recrimination that follow. The killing Cain plotted is much tighter and smarter than anything Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder could ever have accomplished. For one thing, there is no third accomplice. This makes for a cleaner, less traceable crime. The adulterers crack the husband’s neck simply and soundly and he goes without a struggle. More important, Cain’s killers are motivated not only by lust but also by an even more popular American sin: greed. (As a younger Billie Wilder put it in his script for Scampolo, the most important words in the English language are the money.) Cain hangs the crime on insurance fraud, and he sweetens the scam by making one of the insurance company’s own agents commit it. One of Cain’s greatest lines is his protagonist’s explanation of how his industry earns its profits. His theory is elegant and pure: “You bet that your house will burn down, they bet it won’t, that’s all.” For Walter Neff, crooking the house might be fun.

  Brackett found the whole business tawdry. Billy found it irresistible. Since each of them had separate long-term deals with Paramount, they were not contractually bound to work with each other. Given their stormy relationship, the writing team’s breakup over Double Indemnity has been widely assumed to have been characteristic—which is to say nasty and violent. But it may just as easily have been nothing more than an awkward parting of the ways for the duration of a single film. They had each written scripts independently in the past; that was nothing new. The only difference was that Billy was now directing their films and Charlie was producing them, so perhaps the stakes seemed a bit greater when they decided to split up for this particular project. Years later, in an interview with Garson Kanin, Wilder characterized their temporary dissolution as just another kind of adultery, a sin he always treated casually: “1944 was The Year of Infidelities.’ Charlie produced The Uninvited. I had nothing to do with it. Instead, I wrote Double Indemnity with Raymond Chandler.… I don’t think he ever forgave me. He always thought I cheated on him with Raymond Chandler. He got very possessive after that.” Brackett put a different spin on the episode. He told Kanin, separately, that “Billy got so despondent at being without me that we did The Lost Weekend,” a depressing film about a writer who has trouble writing.