On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder and Chandler were also kicking around the idea of changing the ending. Cain’s novel concluded with a shipboard suicide for Walter and Phyllis, but Chandler and Wilder had something a little more graphic in mind. They wanted to gas Walter to death at San Quentin. This would certainly solve the PCA’s problem with the story’s glorification of crime, since Walter wouldn’t be given the chance to end his life by his own hand. No, he would be caught, convicted, and punished—strapped to a chair and gassed on the twenty-five-foot-plus silver screen for all the world to see. Billy had a powerful urge to make sure that no one who saw Double Indemnity would ever be able to forget watching genial Fred MacMurray choke and die in a gas chamber. A generic prison set simply wouldn’t do. So in the beginning of July, Wilder, Chandler, Sistrom, Buddy Coleman, and a few others traveled by train to the San Quentin penitentiary itself on a fact-finding mission. If Paramount was going to break new cinematic ground by executing the film’s hero on-screen, the production team thought it had better look right.

  The screenplay Wilder and Chandler developed from the basic story line of Cain’s novel features an additional love relationship with a pivotal character, one that required precision casting. Cain’s Walter falls in love twice—first with Phyllis, and then with Phyllis’s stepdaughter, Lola. The first love affair is evil; the second, not being sexual, remains clean. For the screenwriters, neither of these relationships would be fully satisfying to an audience. Phyllis is increasingly repulsive, and Lola, who must remain un-corrupted, could not afford to get too close to an older killer, the man with whom her stepmother had already had an affair, the man who broke her own father’s neck. There needed to be someone else—someone close. So Wilder and Chandler built up the role of Barton Keyes, Walter’s boss at the insurance company. For Cain, Keyes serves as the force of rationality, a sort of master key that unlocks mysteries and sets them right. He’s a character of justice and moral reckoning; he investigates people for a living. As Cain puts it (in a simile picked up by Wilder and Chandler), Barton Keyes “is a wolf on a phony claim.”

  Keyes is the conscience of the novel, but Wilder and Chandler make him much more emotionally central. He is not only a moral force in the film but also becomes instead a paternal, fraternal, and avuncular character, all in one. For Wilder, he’s a figure of love—short, chubby, sweating love. Keyes smokes cigars compulsively. He is a man who has more important things on his mind than where he last put his matches, so in Wilder and Chandler’s script, he constantly requires Walter’s assistance, however little Keyes himself appears to be aware of it. Whenever the older man fumbles around his jacket pockets searching for the matches he never keeps, his younger friend pulls out one of his own, flicks it singlehandedly against his thumbnail, and provides the missing light. It’s a gesture of affection, a poignant acknowledgment of one man’s need for another. Billy picked Edward G. Robinson for the role.

  The bond between Walter Neff and Barton Keyes would, in Wilder and Chandler’s adaptation, find its greatest expression in the final death house sequence. It would be the image of Keyes, standing alone, that ended the film. There would be a verbal setup scene, with Walter lying bleeding on the floor of the office. Then Billy killed him:

  Fade in: Witness Room in the Death Chamber—San Quentin—Day…. The Door to the Gas Chamber. It is open. The three GUARDS come out of the gas chamber and into the antechamber, where stand the WARDEN, EXECUTIONER, two DOCTORS, the MINISTER, and the ACID MAN, and possibly several GUARDS…. The WARDEN makes a motion to the ACID MAN [who] releases the mixed acid into a pipe connecting with a countersunk receptacle under NEFF’s chair….

  Int. Gas Chamber—Med. Shot.

  Camera is shooting above NEFF’s head (just out of shot), toward spectators standing outside the gas chamber, KEYES in the center. Gas floats up into scene between camera and spectators. KEYES, unable to watch, looks away.

  After momentarily gassing his audience, Wilder planned to cut away from the interior of the chamber to one of the doctors listening to Neff’s heartbeat through a linked stethoscope. Once he pronounces Neff dead, and the guard escorts the witnesses out, Billy would cut to:

  Corridor Outside the Death Chamber. Camera shooting in through the open door at KEYES, who is just turning to leave. KEYES comes slowly out into the dark, narrow corridor. His hat is on his head now; his overcoat is pulled around him loosely. He walks like an old man. He takes eight or ten steps, then mechanically reaches a cigar out of his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. His hands, in the now familiar gesture, begin to pat his pockets for matches. Suddenly he stops, with a look of horror on his face. He stands rigid, pressing a hand against his heart. He takes the cigar out of his mouth and goes slowly on toward the door, camera panning with him. When he has almost reached the door, the GUARD there throws it wide, and a blaze of sunlight comes in from the prison yard outside. KEYES slowly walks out into the sunshine, stiffly, his head bent, a forlorn and lonely man. Fade out. THE END.

  Shooting began on September 27 after several days of testing the dreary, glaring opening sequence at Sixth and Olive Streets in Los Angeles, using doubles for MacMurray. The first scenes to go before the camera were those between Walter and Phyllis’s maid, Nettie; they were soon followed by Walter’s introduction to Phyllis as she stands at the top of a staircase wearing nothing but a towel—and an ankle bracelet. “I’ve just been taking a sun bath,” she explains. “No pigeons around, I hope,” he answers with a delightful smirk.

  Even before Walter comments, “That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson,” Wilder and John Seitz capture the cheap glamour of Phyllis’s dazzling foot in a crane shot that follows her legs as they walk down the length of the stairway. Filmed through the iron grillwork of the railing, this L.A. housewife’s shaved and beautifully lit calves take on an even more fetishized charge, thereby turning a single piece of costuming into one of the most memorable images in the American cinema. Encircled by a little band of metal, Phyllis’s leg becomes lurid. The lust it sparks in Walter seems fresh every time—so fresh, in fact, that it’s shocking to leaf through Double Indemnity’s itemized production budget and find that the whole bit was planned and detailed long in advance of its filming. There, under costuming expenses, is an entry for two ankle bracelets. They cost $25 a pair. (Paramount was nothing if not organized; the studio appears to have purchased a backup in case the first bracelet snapped.)

  Walter and Phyllis wind their way into a scene that any self-respecting film buff knows by heart. Walter is on the make—so much so that he appears to have forgotten why he’s even shown up at Phyllis’s house to begin with. “He’ll be in then,” she tells him:

  “Who?”

  “My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.”

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

  “How fast was I going, officer?”

  “I’d say around ninety.”

  “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.”

  “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.”

  “Suppose it doesn’t take.”

  “Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.”

  “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”

  “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.”

  “That tears it.”

  The film had to look just as good. Wilder’s admiration for John Seitz only grew during the filming of Double Indemnity. Of all the cinematographers Wilder worked with over his long career, he found Seitz to be (in his words) the most “realistic,” a quality that for Wilder was supreme. As he had done with Five Graves to Cairo, Seitz was both technically adept and personally accommodating. “He was ready for anything,” Wilder said. “Sometimes the rushes were so dark that you couldn’t see anything. He went to the limits of what could be done.”
Seitz’s gloomy, discreetly gorgeous photography paralleled the work of Paramount’s set designer, Hal Pereira, who created a series of low-key but highly suggestive interiors that appear at once realistic and mythical. As Walter strolls through Phyllis’s living room, for instance, Seitz’s lighting carves up the space into subtle swaths of black-and-white stripes (thanks to the judiciously placed venetian blinds) while Pereira’s set design reveals Phyllis’s darker aspects without calling attention to anything in particular. (Legend has it that Pereira’s design for Walter’s drab apartment was based on the room Wilder occupied at the Chateau Marmont in 1934 and 1935, but since the very nature of that room remains doubtful, the story of Pereira’s design is equally dubious. After all, Walter’s apartment features no public toilets.)

  For Neff’s office at the hilariously named Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company (Cain called his, almost as amusingly, General Fidelity), Pereira and Wilder conspired to create a little in-house joke at Paramount. In the opening scenes of the film, Walter Neff stumbles into the office in the middle of the night to record a confessional memo to Barton Keyes. The vast two-tiered office is empty and dark. With the camera following him, Walter lurches toward a balcony railing overlooking rows and rows of hideously uniform corporate desks. He turns left, but the camera continues forward until it reaches the brink, whereupon it stares for an anxious moment into the abyss, a colorless American business purgatory. Pereira is said to have copied an existing office—the corporate headquarters of Paramount Pictures in New York.

  The only set in Double Indemnity that looks like a set is the interior of the market in which Walter and Phyllis meet to arrange the final details of their crime. Pereira based the interior design on a real Hollywood grocery store—Jerry’s Market on Melrose—but there’s something hollow and unreal about the copy. Then again, the relative stiffness of these sequences may have been due in part to a certain tension on the soundstage on which the market set was built. The cans and boxes of food and supplies that line the store’s shelves in perfect order were actually full of real food and supplies, and since Double Indemnity was made during a period of wartime rationing, Paramount found it necessary to hire cops to guard the set, even during the shoot, to keep the cast and crew from going shopping on the sly. Even with this surveillance, however, one can of peaches and four bars of laundry soap were pinched.

  The actors in Double Indemnity are marvelous—MacMurray was never better—but Double Indemnity is essentially a director’s movie. Wilder’s precise sense of timing pulls the narrative inexorably forward—as Walter puts it, straight down the line—to its grim, fatal conclusion. Even in a scene as patently artificial as the one in which Phyllis’s car won’t start, Wilder mounts the tension so effortlessly but potently that you forget you are watching a time-honored Hollywood suspense device. At the time, Wilder’s instructions during the shooting of that scene were excessive—at least as far as his leading man was concerned. According to MacMurray, he and Stanwyck sat in a dummy car busily faking the engine-failure scene and doing it just as they would have done it for any other director. MacMurray wanted to get it over with. “I was doing it fast, and Billy kept saying, ‘Make it longer, make it longer,’ and finally I yelled, ‘For chrissake, Billy, it’s not going to hold that long,’ and he said, ‘Make it longer,’ and he was right. It held.” As Billy explained to the Los Angeles Times when the film was released, “I have always felt that surprise is not as effective as suspense.” He made it a point, he said, to identify the guilty parties right off the bat and then stand back and watch “the net closing, closing.”

  On November 24, the last day of production, the cast and crew headed out to do some final location shooting—first to the street in front of Phyllis’s house (the corner of El Contento and Quebec in the Hollywood Hills), where they shot some footage of boys and girls playing baseball, and then to a bowling alley on La Cienega Boulevard to film the scene in which Walter kills some time on the lanes and tries to calm down after meeting Phyllis. Despite the fact that he’d been working hard for weeks on end, MacMurray still managed to bowl five straight strikes. Billy dared him to do it again, and his star ended up with a backache. “I just wanted to be sure you’d be through with the part before we crippled you,” Billy told him. MacMurray and Wilder got along well, as did Billy and Stanwyck. The stars’ initial misgivings gave way when they saw how beautifully Double Indemnity played during filming. According to Billy, MacMurray was “a notorious line-muffer,” but “he got so interested he never missed one.” This is a slight exaggeration on Billy’s part. In fact, while filming his initial Dictaphone scene, MacMurray kept blowing his lines. It was a long speech in a single long take, and MacMurray couldn’t manage to get it all out without flubbing something along the way: “You were pretty good in there for a while, Keyes. You said it wasn’t an accident. Check. You said it wasn’t suicide. Check. You said it was murder. Check. You thought you had it cold, didn’t you? All wrapped up in tissue paper with pink ribbons around it. It was perfect. Except it wasn’t, because you made one mistake. Just one little mistake. When it came to picking the killer you picked the wrong guy. You want to know who killed Dietrichson? Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson. Me. Walter Neff. Insurance salesman. Thirty-five years old, unmarried, no visible scars—till a while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money. And for a woman. I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  MacMurray tried hard, but he just couldn’t do it. He took his line-reading misfires in stride. Without missing a beat, he continued, in character, speaking directly into the microphone: “Memo to Wilder—MacMurray blew his topper again.”

  At 5:55 on the afternoon of November 24, principal photography on Double Indemnity was completed with a shot of Walter in his car at a drive-in restaurant, a beer on a tray attached to the car door. Walter drinks it. It was a sort of culminating if inadvertent toast, a celebration of yet another smooth production under Billy’s belt. The director was very pleased with the work his crew had done, and he respected most of his cast’s performance as well. He told John Seitz later that he thought Double Indemnity was nearly perfect, the only two flaws being the relatively inexperienced performances of Jean Heather as Lola and Byron Barr as her boyfriend, Nino Sachetti.

  Some retakes were shot in December and January owing to scratches on the original film, but these were minor, typical annoyances. Billy knew his gamble had paid off. The war with Chandler, the war with the PCA, the war with all the worried naysayers around the studio—they were worth it. Double Indemnity was a damn good movie. In January, high on his own success, Wilder breezed around the Paramount lot telling everyone that he was obviously the sole surviving genius at the studio now that Preston Sturges had left. (Sturges and Paramount parted ways at the end of December.) Wilder may have been a blowhard, but he had the talent to back it up. Double Indemnity works.

  In Walter’s final scene with Phyllis, just before they shoot each other, he explains something to her about the nature of their characters. “We’re both rotten,” says Stanwyck. “Only you’re a little more rotten,” says MacMurray. This is necessarily so. She’s a woman. Pure, easygoing contempt, a man’s self-awareness, and blame—particularly sexual blame. The line is a highlight of Billy Wilder’s writing career, but the printed word falls completely short of conveying the moment’s visceral intensity. Wilder’s best lines were never meant to be read. Their resonance comes from their being as alive as art permits. Wilder’s films are profoundly experiential. “We’re both rotten,” says Stanwyck; “Only you’re a little more rotten,” says MacMurray. It is not just the words, as clever as they are. It’s the smirk on MacMurray’s face as he utters them, the shadows that fall across the screen, the smutty energy of a man and a woman pointing guns at each other’s guts—energy Wilder not only invites but compels us to share and enjoy. When MacMurray says “Good-bye, baby” and shoots her to death, it feels good.

 
Fred MacMurray’s execution scene had been shot on November 17. One account claims that Paramount spent as much as $150,000 to re-create the gas chamber (said in this version to be Folsom, not San Quentin), but this was clearly not the case. The film’s budget allocated $4,695 to that portion of the set. Still, the gas chamber ending was scrapped. More than fifty years later it is still not clear why.

  Explanations have included disastrous previews and unbeatable demands from the Hays Office. But the fact is that Wilder and Chandler had written two possible endings for Double Indemnity, and they wrote them both before shooting even started.

  A script dated September 25, 1943, features a romantic, male-bonding ending: Neff lies on the floor in the doorway and tells Keyes that the reason he couldn’t figure out who killed Dietrichson is that the killer was sitting across the desk from him. “Closer than that, Walter,” Keyes responds. “I love you, too,” says Walter. The dying man tries to light his cigarette and fails. Keyes produces the flame and reaches out with it to Walter. They make eye contact. The end.

  But the September 25 script continues: “See following pages for alternate ending.” In the possible substitute, Walter, holding Keyes’s handkerchief, says “At the end of that … trolley line … just as I get off … you be there to say good-bye … will you, Keyes?” at which point there would be a fade-out/fade-in to the gas chamber sequence. A script dated October 25 contains the gas chamber ending only. Wilder has claimed that the gas chamber sequence was one of the two best sequences he ever shot, but it’s a claim he can afford to make, since the sequence disappeared without a trace into the vaults of Paramount Pictures and has never been screened since.