tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32685968.post1186159835039380864..comments2024-03-25T10:47:42.656-07:00Comments on Can't Explain: Double Indemnity (1944)Jeff Pikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17148737647138431543noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32685968.post-76381815405858179722019-03-15T23:26:35.763-07:002019-03-15T23:26:35.763-07:00I thought Robinson kind of stole the show a bit in...I thought Robinson kind of stole the show a bit in this one. Also liked him in Scarlet Street. I know he played leads too but he sort of defines for me the idea of a character actor. I only know for sure one other title on your list, Arsenic & Old Lace, so I'm slacking on 1944. Thanks for the list. Skip D. Expense:https://www.blogger.com/profile/14151899427742882544noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32685968.post-49826034975039684262019-03-12T15:18:47.150-07:002019-03-12T15:18:47.150-07:00I'd never seen "Double Indemnity" un...I'd never seen "Double Indemnity" until recent years, but it's rapidly become one of my very favorite movies, for all the qualities you've identified so incisively. My initial acquaintance with Fred MacMurray was watching "My Three Sons" when I was in high school, and I'd thought, "God, this father-knows-beige MacMurray plays makes Ward Cleaver look like a bohemian!" So I've been bowled over in my mature life with amazement at how perfectly Fred had earlier essayed the 90%-corrupted heavies in both "Double Indemnity" and Wilder's later "The Apartment". Your note of Edward G. Robinson's "many small and surprisingly entertaining soliloquies about insurance statistics" in his role as Barton Keyes hits peak double identity for me, I love those declamations, especially when he reveals that he has statistics on all the methods of suicide, including "under the feet of horses"(!) -- I doubt if that version was still in vogue at the time, but Keyes was ready for it in any event. <br /><br />Regarding your impression that "Double Indemnity" is so downbeat it's amazing it got made right in the middle of the American war effort, it's actually a "period" film, mysteriously set in only-yesterday 1938, even to the point of having Walter Neff drive a '38 Dodge and Phyllis Dietrichson a similar-vintage LaSalle, so that no newer-model cars might betray the chronology. I'm not sure why a 1938 setting was chosen -- James M. Cain's source novel was published in 1943, but had earlier been serialized, in the late '30s, so maybe that creation myth was kept intact. But I think you may be on to something, in that the movie's plot couldn't have been so darkly intense if it had to admit there was a bigger war going on elsewhere; note that the train Walter hops on and off isn't filled with soldiers as those in so many other movies made in the '40s. However it was spun, a great movie happened. <br /><br />-- Richard Riegel Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com