Chandler and Wilder concocted some salty, innuendo-strewn interchanges for Walter and Phyllis not found in Cain’s novelette. A striking example occurs during their first encounter. Walter gets fresh with Phyllis after eyeing her provocatively draped towel: “I’m an insurance agent, and I can see you are not fully covered.” Phyllis responds in a playful, coy fashion that demonstrates that she is Walter’s match when it comes to naughty innuendo: “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff.” Walter replies, “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.” “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” Phyllis answers with a smirk.
As Walter prepares to leave, he inquires suggestively whether Phyllis will be home when he returns to see her husband. “I wonder what you mean,” Phyllis says. Walter retorts, “I wonder if you wonder.” As a matter of fact, when Walter returns, Phyllis is home, but she has made sure that her husband is not. Phyllis then broaches to Walter the possibility of his drawing up a double indemnity accident policy for her husband. In due course, this leads to their planning Dietrichson’s death for the insurance money.
Walter’s better judgment tells him not to get involved with a femme fatale like Phyllis, writes Frank Krutnik, and Walter’s “voice-over commentary provides a suggestively phallic metaphor for the danger and excitement” of the enterprise.53 “I knew I had hold of a red-hot poker,” Walter muses, “and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off.” Walter ignores his misgivings, however, and goes along with Phyllis’s plot. In short, although Walter is capable of recognizing evil when he sees it, he still succumbs to it.
A central metaphor in the Chandler-Wilder script is that of a trolley car one must ride to the end of the line.54 When Walter agrees to help Phyllis liquidate her husband, he says that their plan “has got to be perfect, straight down the line.” Walter immediately comments in a voice-over, “The machinery had started to move, and nothing could stop it.” As Walter prepares to kill Dietrichson later that same night, he reflects on the sound track that fate “had thrown the switch. The gears had meshed.” The trolley “had started to move, and nothing could stop it.”
After the murder, Keyes parallels Walter’s “straight down the line” perception. Keyes suspects Phyllis of engineering her husband’s death with the help of an unknown accomplice. “They’ve committed a murder,” he says, “and that’s not like taking a trolley ride together, where each one can get off at a different stop. They’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line. And it’s a one-way trip, and the last stop is the cemetery.”
The scene in which Walter murders Phyllis’s husband provides a dramatic high point in Walter’s narrative. Dietrichson is determined to take a train trip, despite the fact that he has a broken leg and must walk with crutches. As Phyllis drives him to the train station, Walter crouches unseen in the backseat of the car. When Walter suddenly pounces on Dietrichson and chokes him to death, the camera moves in on a close-up of Phyllis, who stares unflinchingly at the road ahead. Wilder allowed the audience to imagine the murder while it takes place off camera, “because what the audience does not see can sometimes be more frightening than what they do see.”
Because Dietrichson is slain when he has a broken leg, Walter must board the train on crutches when impersonating him, recalling the image of the dark figure on crutches in the opening credits. Walter must make it appear that the crippled man was killed as the result of an accidental fall from the train. He accordingly rides the train for a few miles and then jumps off, crutches and all, at the prearranged spot, where Phyllis is waiting for him with her husband’s corpse still in the car. Walter dumps the body, along with the crutches, on the railroad track.
The low-key lighting that John Seitz employed in Five Graves to Cairo creates an even darker, more sinister atmosphere in Double Indemnity. In the scene in which the lovers implement their plan to murder Dietrichson, they are enveloped in almost total darkness. The lighting emphasizes how the guilty lovers are trying to hide their evil deed under a cloak of darkness. In retrospect, it is evident that in this film Seitz set the standard for the shadowy, somber lighting for the noir films to come.
It certainly looks as if Walter and Phyllis’s plan has worked and fate is on their side. But Keyes proves to be an obstacle to the success of their plot. Walter and Phyllis fear that he may eventually finger Walter as Phyllis’s partner in crime if he happens to see them together.
In one scene Phyllis is about to knock on the door of Walter’s apartment when she hears Walter talking with Keyes inside. As the door opens and Keyes comes out, Phyllis quickly hides behind the half-open door. Fred MacMurray told me that Wilder “tampered with realism” in that scene by having the door open outward into the hall, so that Phyllis can conveniently disappear behind it as Keyes leaves—despite the fact that doors normally open inward.55 Be that as it may, the scene provides another suspenseful highlight in the film, as Cain himself noted: “I wish I had thought of something like that.”56
Later on, Walter’s relationship with Phyllis unravels when he discovers that she has been using him to help her obtain the payoff from the insurance company. She actually plans to double-cross Walter by taking the money and running off—not with him but with still another, younger man. Walter forces a showdown with Phyllis in her stifling, shuttered living room. “Tangerine” is being crooned somewhere in the night, “probably from a neighboring radio” (as the script has it), and the romantic ballad wafts into Phyllis’s living room.57 The love song is an ironic comment on the romantic illusions Walter nurtured about the faithless Phyllis.
Walter tells Phyllis about Keyes’s theory that two people who commit murder are trapped on a trolley car and their only way out is death. He then informs Phyllis that he is not going to ride the streetcar to the end of the line; rather, he plans to get off the trolley “right at this corner.” With that, the pair shoot it out. Phyllis grievously wounds Walter and is about to fire again when she experiences a split second of remorse. She admits that she is “rotten to the heart.” Then she looks into his eyes and begs Walter to embrace her. She hesitates to fire the second shot, which will finish him off, and instead professes her need for him. As Bernard Dick describes Phyllis, “We see what Neff sees—a face that, for an instant, loses its rodent-like sharpness and becomes almost human. But it is only for an instant.”58 Walter, convinced of her deep duplicity, has trusted her for the last time. “I’m sorry, Baby; I’m not buying,” he mutters. “Goodbye, Baby.” Walter embraces her; then he fires two shots and kills her on the spot. Thus Walter’s final embrace of Phyllis ends when he ejaculates bullets into her; it is the logical consummation of their sordid liaison. Walter, though gravely wounded, still has enough life in him to make it to his office and record his confession for Keyes.
After viewing Double Indemnity, Cain remarked that it was “the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wished I had thought of; Wilder’s ending was much better than my ending.”59 It is easy to agree with Cain on that point. The novelette ends with Walter and Phyllis fleeing to Mexico onboard a steamer. But they have reason to believe that they have been recognized aboard ship, and so Phyllis, who has by now sunk completely into madness, convinces Walter to join her in a suicide pact by jumping overboard. Phyllis, a grotesque figure dressed in a blood-red shroud, with her face painted a deathly white, materializes like a ghostly apparition in Walter’s cabin to summon him to his doom. They both are prepared to die. The mass audience, Dick quite rightly judges, “would not understand anything quite so operatic.”60
Keyes, in describing his job as a claims investigator for Walter earlier in the movie, defines his role as “a doctor, a bloodhound, a cop, a judge, a jury, and a father-confessor, all in one.” Certainly Keyes is Walter’s father-confessor, since it is to Keyes that Walter confesses his crimes on the Dictaphone. In fact, the father-son relationship between Walter and Keyes is evident throughout the film. “The real love story is not between Neff an
d Phyllis, but between Neff and Keyes,” Jeffrey Meyers declares. “Neff’s criminal betrayal of his friend and mentor gives the tawdry story a new dimension.”61 Cain noted that “there’s a hint” of the filial relationship of Walter to Keyes in the book, “but it was extended in the movie.”62 As Schickel puts it, “Keyes’s part was expanded in the film to flesh out his relationship with Neff, which almost doesn’t exist in the book.”63
In the film, as Walter finishes dictating his memo to Keyes, he looks up and sees Keyes, who has been summoned by the night porter; he has been standing in the doorway, unobserved, for some time. Walter tells Keyes that he could not identify Dietrichson’s murderer “because the guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.” Keyes replies, “Closer than that, Walter.” Neff responds wryly, “I love you too.” Despite his offhand, almost mocking tone of voice, the remark reflects the deep affection and respect he nurtures for Keyes.
Walter’s strength is ebbing away, but he still manages to put a cigarette in his mouth, and Keyes lights it for him. In doing so, Keyes performs for Walter the ritual gesture of friendship that Walter has often performed for him. Throughout the film Walter lights Keyes’s cigar for him as an implicit gesture of filial feeling for his father figure. Now Keyes, with a veiled display of affection, returns the favor, as they await the police.
Some critics have inferred a hint of homosexuality in the relationship of Walter and Keyes. Parker Tyler goes so far as to say that Keyes is “secretly hot” for Neff, as evidenced by the scene described above. But such a reading of a Wilder movie misconstrues the value the director placed on male companionship in a number of his films.
Double Indemnity was originally intended to conclude with Walter’s execution. Wilder even filmed him dying in the gas chamber at San Quentin. The scene took five days to shoot and, according to Lally, cost a whopping $150,000. Actually, the itemized budget for the picture included only $4,700 for the set.64 Perhaps Wilder had the Snyder-Gray execution in mind when he developed the execution scene with Chandler. He shot the scene with minute precision: there were the pellets of poison dropping and the fumes they caused; in addition, “I had the priest from San Quentin, and I had the warden and the doctor.”65
The execution scene was shot before the scene portraying the last meeting between Walter and Keyes was filmed. Once that final, intimate exchange between Walter and Keyes was in the can, Wilder began to wonder if the execution scene was not superfluous. Without the execution scene to follow it, the viewer easily infers that Walter will soon die of his fatal wound. Moreover, after Wilder viewed the completed execution sequence, almost eighteen minutes of footage, he felt uneasy about it. He found it unduly gruesome and too harsh for the mass audience to digest, so he decided to end the film with Walter lying grievously wounded in the company of his fatherly friend. Thus, when Walter begs Keyes to give him time to make it across the border to Mexico, Keyes replies, “You’ll never make the elevator.” Walter staggers toward the exit, only to collapse helplessly in the doorway, where he lies at death’s door. One assumes he will die in Keyes’s arms, perhaps even before the police arrive.
The final version of the screenplay omits not only the execution scene but also a line of dialogue spoken by Walter to Keyes just after Walter says, “I love you too”—which is the last line in the final script and in the film as released. At this point in the original draft, Walter makes a final request of Keyes: “At the end of the trolley line, just as I get off, you be there to say goodbye, will you, Keyes?”66 This line was meant to serve as a transition to the execution scene, for, as James Naremore remarks, the initial version of the script “went on to show Keyes at the penitentiary, honoring his friend’s wishes.”67 Walter’s reference to the trolley car hearkens back to Keyes’s earlier observation that Phyllis and her partner in crime were trapped on a trolley car that would carry them to their doom. With or without the execution scene, Keyes’s ominous prediction comes true.
William Hare assumes that the ending of the released version of the film constitutes “new material” that Wilder and Chandler devised as a substitute for the execution sequence.68 A comparison of the original version of the screenplay (dated September 25, 1943) with the final version (dated November 27, 1943) shows his assumption to be false, however. The final script is shorter than the original simply because it omits the death chamber sequence and ends the film with the final encounter of Walter and Keyes in the insurance office.69 In any case, the gas chamber sequence seems to be a postscript to the story. The ending of the movie as it stands is much more powerful and moving, and could not be bettered. Wilder excised the execution scene while working on the final edit of the film with Doane Harrison.
Wilder remembered that, after a sneak preview of the picture in a theater in Westwood in July 1944, Cain waited for him in the lobby and told him that he much admired the film. His story, he told Wilder, “has been put on the screen exactly as I wrote it, only more so.”70
Critics hailed the movie as a thriller deftly served up by master chefs, with a superior script and inspired direction. The movie grossed more than $2.5 million on its initial release and garnered Oscar nominations for best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography (John Seitz), musical score (Miklos Rozsa), and actress (Barbara Stanwyck). Leo McCarey’s Going My Way, a sentimental Paramount picture with Bing Crosby as a priest, also received multiple nominations. The studio campaigned mostly for McCarey’s heartwarming picture, reasoning that it had a better chance of snagging Oscars than Wilder’s nasty movie. Wilder felt betrayed by his own studio and was miffed when his picture won no Academy Awards at the ceremony on March 15, 1945. When McCarey was on his way up to the podium to accept the best director award for Going My Way, Wilder recalled, he stuck his foot out and deliberately tripped McCarey. Wilder chortled, “Mr. McCarey stumbled perceptibly.”
When a reporter asked him after the ceremony for his reaction to the losses, Wilder snapped, “What the hell does the Academy Award mean, for God’s sake? After all, Luise Rainer won it two times—Luise Rainer!”71 (Rainer had won a best actress award for The Great Ziegfeld [1936] and another for The Good Earth [1937], but within three years her career had inexplicably evaporated, and by 1945 she was all but forgotten.) Nonetheless, even with no Oscar for his direction of Double Indemnity, Wilder was widely considered Paramount’s resident genius, since Preston Sturges, the only other writer-director on the lot, had severed his connection with the studio in December 1943.
In recent years commentators on Double Indemnity have steadily come to recognize it as quintessential film noir. “Double Indemnity was a milestone in opening new avenues for the frank portrayal of sexuality and criminality on the screen,” writes Gaylyn Studlar. “Wilder confirmed that Hollywood filmmakers could take a sophisticated, artistically complex approach to crime, even while operating under the moral restrictions” of the industry’s censorship code.72
Even though, Wilder said, Charles Brackett “thought I cheated on him with Raymond Chandler,” they were reconciled: “Charles and I got together again for The Lost Weekend,” a psychological study of an alcoholic.73 In addition to collaborating with Wilder on the screenplay, Brackett again acted as producer, and Wilder continued to direct. The word around the film colony was that the dynamic duo was back in action.
5
Through a Glass Darkly
The Lost Weekend and Die Todesmühlen
I have supp’d full with horrors.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Billy Wilder was on his way by train to New York for a holiday in the spring of 1944. He picked up a copy of Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend at a kiosk during the stopover at Union Station in Chicago. Wilder sat up all night reading it. By the time he reached Pennsylvania Station in New York City the following morning, Wilder had finished the book. He was convinced that it would make an engrossing movie.
Wilder phoned Paramount executive Buddy De Sylva from the station a
nd requested that the studio purchase the screen rights to the book. De Sylva informed him that Y. Frank Freeman was out of town but said that he would buy the novel for Wilder on his own authority. So De Sylva plunked down fifty thousand dollars for The Lost Weekend.1 De Sylva had started in show business as a lyricist for major songwriters like Jerome Kern, with whom he had composed “Look for the Silver Lining.” He graduated to producing pictures and became Paramount’s head of production in 1939. He supported Wilder in the making of Double Indemnity, which turned out well, and he was more than willing to sponsor another Wilder project. Wilder then sold Brackett on the book; both were eager to collaborate again.2
When Freeman learned what De Sylva had done in his absence, he was outraged. As a Bible Belt Baptist, he did not approve of Paramount’s making what he considered a sordid movie about a disreputable souse. Wilder did not relish having to face Freeman, who had likewise strongly disapproved of Double Indemnity. Freeman called an executive meeting to rake Wilder over the coals.3 Wilder presented an inspired talk at the meeting, in which he emphasized that the movie would not be a dreary message picture about temperance. “If you want to send a message,” he commented, “go to Western Union.” He said that the script would focus on the romance between the main character and his loyal girlfriend. He devised on the spot a classic “meet-cute” to rival the one he had pitched to Ernst Lubitsch for the script of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In the present instance the hero and heroine would meet over the mix-up of their coats in the cloakroom of the Metropolitan Opera House. But Freeman remained intransigent; he stated emphatically that The Lost Weekend would be made “over my dead body.” Wilder muttered under his breath that that could be arranged.4
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