Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity
Before moving to direction, Billy Wilder, like Preston Sturges, turned out a lot of screenplays (Wilder’s were usually co-written with Charles Brackett). A prickly Austro-Hungarian refugee from Germany, Wilder’s smart-aleck voice as a writer comes through loud and clear in his scripts for Ernst Lubitsch and Mitchell Leisen. Wilder had a weakness for lines of often-questionable taste; Lubitsch and Leisen could put some of these lines over, but not all. For instance, when Greta Garbo’s Soviet commissar is asked about the Moscow show trials in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), she solemnly intones that “there will be fewer but better Russians.” It’s a line that aims to get a gasp and then a bit of a laugh, a sort of stiletto jab, and it works. But then there’s the moment in Leisen’s Arise, My Love (1940) when a man says that he’s anxious to get to war with Germany because, “I’ve always wanted to drop something on Hamburg after getting ptomaine from that hamburger.” This isn’t even remotely funny, or interesting, or anything. It’s just a miscalculation of tone.
You never know which Wilder you’re going to get in these early scripts or in his later movies. There’s the man who completely understood Gloria Swanson’s demented silent screen relic Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the changing gender mores of Some Like It Hot (1959), and then there’s the clod whose camera tours the ruins of Berlin in A Foreign Affair (1948) to the strains of “Isn’t It Romantic?” and who torments Ray Milland’s drunk for showy fun in The Lost Weekend (1945). To quote his old boss, Samuel Goldwyn, with Wilder you have to take the bitter with the sour.
Critical opinion on Wilder has always fluctuated, mainly because it hinges on these highly subjective questions of taste, on deciding when he goes too far or when he doesn’t go far enough. For the first movie he wrote for Stanwyck, Ball of Fire (1941), Wilder gleefully stresses what he sees as the vulgarity in her character, and she rises to the bait while maintaining an untouchable sort of shrewdness. Whatever his faults, Wilder had a keen talent for coming up with character names, and he gives Stanwyck a doozy here: Sugarpuss O’Shea, a gangster’s moll forced to take it on the lam with a cadre of professors working on an encyclopedia.
There are seven of these old profs, just like the seven dwarfs, plus one young grammarian, Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), who needs Sugarpuss to teach him the ins and outs of modern slang, the boogie woogie, the hoi toi toi, the corny and the cheesy. Potts too is well named, and his last name means that Sugarpuss gets to call him Pottsie, reminiscent of Stanwyck’s name for Fonda, “Hopsie,” in the vastly superior The Lady Eve, which had been such a hit earlier in the year. Cooper’s character name thus feels like a nudge reminding people of another movie they liked. Ball of Fire is nothing if not commercial.
Stanwyck received her second Academy Award nomination as best actress for Ball of Fire (it really should have been for Eve, but the academy members had Ball of Fire more freshly situated in their minds), so it has pride of place in her filmography. While she’s somewhere near her best in it—and certainly as sexy as she’d ever be in a movie—Ball of Fire is a flawed film, and there are several reasons why it never quite comes together. It runs one hundred and eleven minutes, which is rather lengthy for such a slim subject, and it has several scenes that go on far too long—especially a sequence where Dan Duryea’s hood, Pastrami, is holding the professors hostage and they slowly work toward getting a heavy portrait to fall on his head.
Pastrami starts shooting things in their room at random, hitting a flower vase that explodes right next to the camera. This ostentatious shot is a good example of another problem here: Gregg Toland’s deep focus photography seems much more suited to a somber melodrama like The Little Foxes (which he shot the same year). So many of Toland’s shots are simply too heavy looking and deliberate for light comedy. When Potts confesses the deepness of his love for Sugarpuss, Toland has Stanwyck put on blackface so that only her eyes glow in the dark, and this trick is typical of his stylistic excesses, which never suit Wilder’s material.
Then there’s the question of tone. The scenes with the professors are just this side of cutesy, with a bedtime nursery score emphasizing what harmless old sweeties these guys are. The actors playing the professors generally follow suit. S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall has many reasons to slap his hands on his shaky jowls to get a laugh, while Henry Travers does his blandly beaming Henry Travers thing. Richard Haydn (as Professor Oddly) is too much in love with the sound of his own overly fastidious voice, so that his speech about his own marriage seems to go on longer than it should. Only that memorable on-screen scoundrel Tully Marshall bothers to seem like a three-dimensional person as Professor Robinson, and the script doesn’t give him enough to work with. If Marshall had played Professor Oddly, the speech about marriage might have had a chance of working.
As Miss Bragg, the old maid housekeeper who treats the professors like naughty children, Kathleen Howard, best known as the harridan wife to W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934), is stuck in an unlikable, go-nowhere role. At one point, Sugarpuss punches Bragg out to keep her from blabbing, and this feels like a mistake, not funny and not really deserved (Stanwyck’s punch actually connected during one take, to her horror, and Howard suffered a fractured jaw for her trouble). Worse still, the coy professor scenes are intercut with a kind of gangster picture featuring Dana Andrews as criminal kingpin Joe Lilac. Andrews’s scenes feel perfunctory, and at the end, he and his men are tossed into a garbage truck, as in a cartoon, yet they seem all too unpleasantly real in earlier parts of the movie. And Cooper is not as precise a comedian as Henry Fonda; his shambling delivery tends to get deliberately vague at times, as if he trusts that his own personal charm can get him out of thinking through his part.
Where is director Howard Hawks in all this? Critic Robin Wood, in his book on Hawks, sees Ball of Fire as an attempt to right the “wrongs” of Hawks’s magnificent Bringing Up Baby, which Wood sees as troublingly anti-intellectual. But to my eyes Ball of Fireonly reflects a stony lack of interest on Hawks’s part. It isn’t really a Hawks movie, either in terms of its look, which falls to Toland, or its attitude, which falls to Wilder. Perhaps the chief culprit, though, is producer Sam Goldwyn, who always managed to impart an overly dignified feeling to most of his movies, a heavy touch fatal to a brash comedy like this.
Considering all these obstacles, it’s nearly incredible that Stanwyck is as good as she is here. There are classic moments, to be sure, not least Sugarpuss’s first entrance. Potts is in a nightclub, researching his slang and jotting down colorful terms in a notebook (something I can imagine Wilder himself doing, so greedy was he for the low side of American culture to remind him of vestiges of his own lost Weimar milieu). We see a lacquered fingernail pounding out the beat to Gene Krupa’s “Drum Boogie” on a curtain, and the nail seems sexy, a little contemptuous, impatient. Even when she’s only acting with the fingers of one hand, Stanwyck manages to give a nuanced performance.
Sugarpuss practically leaps out on stage, wearing a spangly-tatters outfit courtesy of Edith Head that shows off a bare midriff and Dietrich-caliber legs. Martha Tilton, a Benny Goodman warbler, dubs Stanwyck’s singing. The voice may be a little too high, but it’s still not a bad fit (it would have been better to have dubbed Stanwyck with Krupa’s lead canary, Anita O’Day, whose spirited, libidinal, croaky style would have ideally matched the star). The best moment is when Tilton’s voice cuts out and Stanwyck herself cries, “C’mon, Krup, knock yourself out!” and we see the manic, highly sexual Krupa do his inimitable thing with his drums. “Yeah!” Sugarpuss breathes—almost hisses—at the close, using Stanwyck’s own voice again. There’s a brief reprise where Krupa plays the boogie with matchsticks, spoiled by Toland’s glossy concept shot of Sugarpuss’s face gleaming down on a table as he saws away.
“Screw, scram, scraw,” says Sugarpuss, trying to get rid of Professor Potts at her dressing room door, but she changes her tune when she realizes she’ll need a place to stay to hide from the police. She makes another entrance, even more striking, when she shows up at the professors’ domicile. Potts opens the door and she winks and says, “Heidi Ho!” clicking her tongue on her palette (there’s elemental rain beating down behind her). When she hears the seven old professors scampering upstairs, she says, “Hey, what is that?” in a harsh, mean-sounding voice. Stanwyck is always alert to the moments when Sugarpuss lets her hard edges emerge.
Sugarpuss was an orphan, it seems, like Ruby, and ran away from her aunt, but her childhood is no bummer in this movie. Stanwyck tosses the single line about the aunt away as if an unhappy childhood couldn’t possibly matter at this point. Unlike Jean Harrington, whose father insists that she be “crooked but never common,” Sugarpuss can be downright dirty, as when she reacts to Potts’s embarrassment at not being quite dressed, unsettling him with, “You know, once I watched my big brother shave”—one of those Wilder remarks that just skirts that line of upset stomach bad taste. The Wilder “note” is so different from Brackett’s prep school elegance that it’s easy to guess at who did what; the Oddly marriage speech, for instance, seems like pure Brackett.
“Wee, that’s a lot of books!” exclaims Sugarpuss, taking in the large encyclopedia working room. “All of ’em different?” she asks. At a moment like this, I’m grateful that uncultured but ever-sharp Stanwyck is playing this Sugarpuss, and not, say, Ginger Rogers, who was originally pursued for the part but turned it down. Rogers would have played it “dumb,” self-consciously, which is not something Stanwyck could ever do; witness the failure of her dippy heiress in The Mad Miss Manton. “This is the first time anybody’s moved in on my brain,” says Sugarpuss, almost seriously, plunking herself down in a chair and saying she’ll work “all night.” This is not an idle boast, of course. Sugarpuss is likely one of the best lays in the world—a little scary, maybe, but worth it. When Potts hems and haws, she lifts one of her legs up into his face and commands, “Alright, feel that,” extending her foot enough so that Luis Buñuel or Quentin Tarantino would salivate. It’s cold, says Potts. “It’s cold and wet,” she emphasizes, in a lower, more forceful voice, so that this simple statement sounds very rough and visceral, bristling with sexual possibilities.
She enlists the professors on her side, giving her hand to “Cuddles” Sakall and then cracking, “Can I have this now, kid?” when he shows no inclination to let it go. Stanwyck gives this movie what it so sorely lacks, speed and dynamism, and though she’s still not too comfortable with sarcasm, she’s professional enough to deliver the various wisecracks quickly and with aplomb. And she couldn’t be more at ease playing the kind of woman who delights in toying with older men’s fancies. “Any of you can jerk a zipper?” she asks, when she’s trying to close a skirt, her manner not too far from outright hostility, yet willing to be taken by surprise, too. When Sugarpuss falls in love with Potts while manipulating him for her own ends, this romance is believable, even ordained.
Though she knows the score about most of the important things, this is in some ways a naïve woman. After she accepts an engagement ring from Lilac, Sugarpuss wonders if she will continue her nightclub career or “bust in on the Helen Hayes racket,” an idea that doesn’t seem either likely or sensible. There are several shots in this movie where Stanwyck is asked to walk slowly away from the camera. This is neither the exploitation stuff of Mexicali Rose nor the physical idealization of Capra, but rather the pro playing all of her cards, as if she’s thinking, “Sure, I have a nice ass. Have a look, that’s what it’s there for.”
“You’re the one I’m wacky about, just plain wacky,” insists Sugarpuss to Potts, with that curious vehemence Stanwyck often brought to love scenes. She puts several books down on the floor so that she’ll be tall enough to kiss the towering Cooper. When his Potts asks her what she’s doing, Sugarpuss says, “Oh, you’ll find out,” in a heated, offhand way that would get any heterosexual man’s blood racing. Lilac tells Potts that Sugarpuss is a materialist who “sulks if she has to wear last year’s ermine,” but, like many Stanwyck women, she has a basic fineness that lets her see, finally, that there are more important things than fur coats.
When Sugarpuss realizes that she really loves Potts, Stanwyck gets her abstracted look and practically spits out, “I love him because he’s the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk!” As the writer Sheila O’Malley put it in a tribute piece to Stanwyck, “His very innocence shames her. Yet she loves him. She loves his innocence. And yet there’s that epithet at the end, ‘the jerk’! She’s got an edge. She’s feeling as mushy as she’s ever gonna feel, and that pisses her off.” Sugarpuss gets sidelined a bit during the last third, but she’s made her brassy “yum yum” presence felt in a movie that needs to get its act together for her and stop working at cross purposes between Wilder’s Berlin sarcasm, Toland’s pictorial solemnity, Cooper’s mannered cuteness, and Hawks’s cool indifference.
When I mentioned that I was writing a book about Barbara Stanwyck to people around my age (mid-twenties to mid-thirties), they usually didn’t quite know who she was, unfortunately. If they asked me what movies she had been in, I always rushed right to Double Indemnity first, thinking they might have at least heard of that. Stanwyck probably made better movies, but none seem to have had the pop cultural impact of this Billy Wilder classic—even if some recent commentators have taken to making complaints about the blond wig Wilder had her wear.
Some even question her sex appeal in the film. Stanwyck was more than capable, of course, of turning on the sex appeal in both earlier and later movies, not least in the Wilder-scripted Ball of Fire, where she is as delectable a physical specimen as most men could hope for (and here, maybe, is where Hawks’s influence might finally show itself). But in Double Indemnity, there’s a damper placed on that sort of thing, and it has to do, in part, with Wilder’s essential misogyny. So many of his movies evince a distaste for women, especially if they happen to be a bit older than an ingénue and still trying to peddle their sexual wares (just look at how he mocks poor Kim Novak in Kiss Me, Stupid [1964] or Juliet Mills in Avanti! [1972]).
James M. Cain first published Double Indemnity in serial form in 1936. Two years before, he had put out another salacious book about murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice, with intimations of carnal depravity (when the married Cora first couples with drifter Frank Chambers, she tells him to bite her lip and he does so until he draws blood). Both books were inspired by the case of Ruth Snyder, a Queens woman who murdered her husband with the help of another man in order to collect on the dead man’s insurance.
Cain’s Double Indemnity is told in the first person by Walter Huff (Neff in Wilder’s film), an insurance salesman in Los Angeles who walks willingly into a kind of “House of Death” with blood-red drapes, the home of Nirdlinger, an oil man, and his wife Phyllis. In the film, Wilder changes Nirdlinger (a lingering nerd?) to Dietrichson (son of Marlene?), which once again shows his talent for picking just the right character names. In the book, Phyllis is “maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.” Though she has “a washed-out look,” Huff sees that “[u]nder those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts.” So, in Cain’s book, we have a slightly faded dish with a great bod. Not Stanwyck, by any means; more like Veronica Lake as she was in 1952 or 1953.
“I like tea,” says Cain’s rather haughty Phyllis. “It makes a break in the afternoon.” She sounds like a bored housewife, but everything she says might be calculated for effect, so it’s hard to get a read on her. Walter notices a few attractive flaws in Phyllis: two teeth that were “maybe a little bit buck,” and freckles on her forehead. Tiny physical flaws like this can stoke a man’s lust, and they definitely do the trick for Walter. Cain’s prose is tough and funny in these early scenes. It’s not classic wiseacre like Wilder’s patter, but there are plenty of little laughs leading up to an ellipsis; afterwards, we can tell that Walter has laid Phyllis.
When he asks about her husband, Phyllis says, “He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman,” which in retrospect sounds strange. What is her standard for good treatment? She says she doesn’t love her husband, but he’s never done anything bad to her. Then, though, she reveals her psychological buckteeth: “Maybe I’m crazy, but there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then.” A sensible man would have been out the door at “scarlet shroud,” but Walter is a little cracked himself.
Phyllis reflects that she would like to bring death to everyone, so they’d be happy, and she begins to seem not human to Walter. “The firelight was reflected in her eyes like she was some kind of leopard,” he says, employing a startling image in the middle of all the terse dialogue. Phyllis used to be a nurse, and as Walter plans to kill her husband and get a double payday from the insurance company, she often seems to be living in a dream world, but there’s also a sense that in her dreamlike way she is pulling all of the strings.
After the murder, whatever feeling there was between Walter and Phyllis sours: “I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake,” says Walter. This sentiment is far removed from the tough-love tenderness Stanwyck’s Jean Harrington displays when she talks about herself as an axe that needs a turkey. It comes out that Phyllis deliberately killed the first Mrs. Nirdlinger. Then it comes out that she killed three children in the hospital where she was head nurse, one of them for money, and the others just to cover her tracks.
“She’s a pathological case, that’s all,” says Keyes, an overweight insurance investigator. “The worst I ever heard of.” In 1936, a flat-out sociopathic murderer like Phyllis was still an exotic thing, something undreamed of by most people. Today, she’s one of the fictional firsts in a long line of genetic mutations with real-life killer counterparts. Cain makes it clear that Phyllis is incapable of feeling remorse, and in his scariest scene, her stepdaughter Lola remembers walking in on her when she was wrapped in red silk fabric “like a shroud,” her face “smeared” in white powder and lipstick, standing in front of a mirror with a dagger in her hand and making faces at herself. (If Wilder had included this scene in his movie, it might have been Stanwyck’s ultimate mirror moment in film, for she would have dared to look as grotesque as necessary while also doing what she needed to do to access Phyllis’s ghastly, private playacting at murder). Cain’s plot gets too convoluted, and his double-suicide ending on board a ship is neither very believable nor very likely, but he has laid down quite a template for any moviemaker.
Studios were interested in Cain’s story right away, but the censors wouldn’t let them touch it. In the early forties, the rule-breaking Wilder took the novel up in collaboration with Raymond Chandler, the hard-drinking creator of the detective character Philip Marlowe. It was a pairing of opposites, like Wilder’s more storied partnership with the ivy league Charles Brackett, and it yielded a script that tarted up a lot of Cain’s dialogue while shifting some of his emphasis—sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Wilder approached various actors with the script, and they were wary of it, for this was a new type of American movie, something that hadn’t been seen before. There were precedents, like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), but this story was altogether nastier, more constricted, more pitiless.
Stanwyck admired Double Indemnity as a script, but she was nonetheless uncertain about it. “I had never played an out-and-out killer,” she remembered. “I had played medium heavies, but not an out-and-killer.” (I love her term “medium heavy,” which suggests there is a kind of human scale for perfidy). She went to see Wilder. “I was a little frightened of it and, when [I went] back to his office, I said, ‘I love the script and I love you, but I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer. And Mr. Wilder—and rightly so—looked at me and he said, ‘Well, are you a mouse or an actress?’ And I said, ‘Well, I hope I’m an actress.’ He said, ‘Then do the part.’”
Stanwyck told this story to praise Wilder, and she always had high regard for Indemnity because it caused such a stir, but I wonder if her initial hesitation to take the movie spoke to her instinctive sense of what was real and interesting in a role and what wasn’t. Then again, maybe she was just plain scared of playing such a bad seed. Wilder took the right schoolyard tack with her and lightly taunted her, the equivalent of a bully asking, “You chicken?” He then placed that weird blond wig on her head; even he realized a month into shooting that the wig wasn’t working. Buddy DeSylva, the head of Paramount at the time, took a look at the rushes and quipped, “We hired Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.”
Wilder told Ella Smith that, “The wig was not much good, I admit,” but later on he rationalized it as part of “the phoniness of the girl—bad taste, phony wig,” as if his Phyllis is supposed to be wearing a wig. Is she bald, like Constance Towers at the beginning of Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964)? The effect is one of disfigurement, not exactly an aid to any sex appeal Stanwyck could have found for Phyllis. Cain’s Phyllis is a looker but a monster inside, but Wilder’s Phyllis has most of her flaws all on the surface, where we can’t possibly miss them.
Still, on the level of pure craft, Double Indemnity deserves its status. Wilder has pruned away the unnecessary fat in the book’s Lola section and also added some knockout suspense set pieces. The film feels, by and large, very modern, especially in the way it looks. We never seem to be on sets, and there’s a vivid sense of Los Angeles in the exterior location shots (when Stanwyck’s Phyllis enters a grocery store for the last time to scheme with Walter [Fred MacMurray], the sun is glaring down on her, and she’s obviously on a real street in LA). Much of the movie’s visual scheme, with all its Venetian blind shadows and cool Spanish-style architecture, must be credited to cinematographer John Seitz, who went to great lengths to achieve a dusty afternoon look for the Dietrichson house.
Under the opening credits, a man walks on crutches in silhouette to Miklos Rosza’s throbbing, dissatisfied score. This image underlines a kind of impotence, both physical and moral. There are a few urgent shots of a car speeding through the dead of night, and this feeling of a deserted nighttime LA is amplified when MacMurray’s Walter knocks on the door of his office building. An elevator operator lets him in and talks about how the company wouldn’t let him take out insurance because of a heart condition. Walter deals with his chatter curtly, even rudely. But he’s been shot, see, so he has to amble to his office and make his confession, which sets up the first-person narration that carries Cain’s book.
This narration is often redundant. When he walks around the Dietrichson home, Walter tells us in words what we already see; such verbal reinforcement is Wilder’s writerly weakness. There are several points in this movie when Walter is going about his business and we can see what he’s doing and feeling (MacMurray is outstanding as this weak man corrupted by his job), yet when we see Walter bowling, for instance, Wilder has Walter’s voiceover tell us that he’s bowling, and why. Wilder doesn’t quite trust the audience, and falls victim, sometimes, to over-explaining.
The question remains whether Wilder impedes or helps Stanwyck’s performance as Phyllis. By my lights he sometimes does get in her way, not only with that blond wig, but in subtler ways, both visual and verbal—yet she barrels right through him anyway and does some of her most complex work. Her Phyllis is introduced standing at the top of a staircase, wearing only a towel and holding her sunglasses, so that Walter and the camera peer up at her. But there’s nothing too sexual about this entrance; Wilder is too busy giggling. Walter is looking for her husband, he says, to discuss an automobile policy. “Anything I can do?” asks Phyllis, in a brazen come-on voice. “I’d hate to think of you having a smashed fender or something when you’re not … fully covered,” Walter smirks, almost laughing.
She’s been taking a sunbath, she says. “No pigeons around, I hope,” says Walter. To his credit, MacMurray’s face falls a bit, as if Walter is embarrassed after saying this, and MacMurray’s gesture is a good way of dealing with such a gross Wilder joke. Wilder himself said he used to taunt the puritanical Chandler with tales of his lively sex life, and there were women who responded to his brand of ribaldry, which is such a thin veil for contempt. These women must have said Wilder was “so funny,” but humor comes from good places and bad places, and Wilder’s humor is from a particularly bad taste neighborhood, one where you’re probably going to get your gentler sensibilities mugged.
We see Phyllis’s cheap shoes as she walks down the stairs; they have pom-poms on the toes, like something Joan Crawford would have worn in the early thirties (Wilder sets his tale in 1938 to explain why Neff isn’t in the army). Walter makes a dumb joke about The Philadelphia Story (1940), and Phyllis, who has been applying lipstick in a mirror, snaps the lipstick shut to show her impatience with him. She sits down and crosses her shapely legs so he can see her anklet; he notices it, which was her intent, and she uncrosses her legs. When he talks about insurance, Phyllis paces back and forth, and we can see her weighing things in her mind, nervously.
It’s never made terribly clear whether her nervousness in these first scenes is partly real or entirely feigned. Writer Nick Davis sees Stanwyck’s “first sequence of coaxing Walter Neff into her murderous stratagems not as the first, purposefully amateur stage of a larger plot but as an imperfectly managed ploy; she doesn’t harden or elevate Phyllis into a diabolical genius, but presents her as a woman who unmistakably dislikes her husband and dislikes her step-daughter.” The Phyllis we see initially, Davis writes, has to work at being a monster. I think that Stanwyck is trying to complicate Phyllis in these first scenes, since she knows that the plot is going to box her tightly as a villain later on (it should be remembered that Stanwyck always learned the whole script and made a point of keeping the entire thing in her head at all times).
There’s no doubt, though, about what she’s doing in the famous fore-play dialogue that ends this first encounter, a scene that has been so endlessly excerpted on TV that it’s tattooed on most of our brains. Its dialogue almost plays like a vaudeville patter routine. That tone might just be a clue to Stanwyck’s basic approach to this part and this movie. Did the specter of career vaudevillian Frank Fay raise its ugly head in her mind while she was playing this woman who loathes her husband and wants him dead? She observed Fay’s routines on stage during her formative years, and in 1933 she even sank her own money into a Fay revue, Tattle Tales, which marked the last time, regrettably, that Stanwyck acted on stage (she did scenes from her Capra films). Add a dash of Wilder’s Weimar vinegar to this Fay training, and here it is:
“There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour,” says Phyllis, very fast, almost as if she’s waiting for the next “Who’s on first?” line. “How fast was I going, Officer?” parries Neff, the salesman incarnate. “I’d say around ninety,” she says, with a lower inflection—heated, but a parody of “heated,” too. “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket,” raps out Neff, quick as a shot. “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” says Phyllis, suddenly a dominatrix. “Suppose it doesn’t take,” he continues (hit me harder, Mistress!). “Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles,” she purrs (Production Code? What Production Code?). “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” he ponders, a canny masochist. “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder,” she snaps, just like she impatiently closed her lipstick in front of the mirror. “That tears it,” he concludes, and the operative word here is “tears.” Wilder is at his best when he turns his wordsmith glee to slang terms, the gaudier and more disposable the better. Phyllis has completely emasculated this man in one rapid-fire exchange, and he loves it. But she’s weary of her own power, a feeling which maybe reads as the uncertainty we sometimes see in her eyes and in her movements.
Many later critics, most notably Parker Tyler, have seen Wilder’s Double Indemnity as a love story between two men, MacMurray’s Walter and Edward G. Robinson’s Keyes. This feeling is made explicit in Wilder’s dialogue. Walter tells Keyes he loves him several times, always sincerely, though there’s no question that it’s the love of a son for a father. Keyes, on the other hand, does seem to have the hots for Walter, subconsciously; he’s always putting his hands on Walter’s shoulders, and he jealously stays in the room when Walter takes a call from Phyllis. Walter lies to Keyes, says the call is from a girl named Margie, and Keyes says, twice, that he thinks that this Margie “drinks straight from the bottle.” Keyes also lets us know about his one-time brush with matrimony. The “little man” that lives in his gut told him that something was crooked about his bride-to-be, and so he had her investigated and found out that she was a tramp on the take, so he feels justified in shutting women out of his life.
“You’re not smarter, Walter, you’re just a little taller,” says Keyes, using this crack as an excuse to look Neff up and down, and he keeps saying he’s going to tie up cases and wrap them in tissue paper with little pink ribbons on it. Keyes’s life is mainly his job as an insurance investigator—all of his emotions run to Walter, who’s deeply involved in Keyes’s beloved line of work. Wilder, who knew his Freud, has Walter always lighting Keyes’s cigars for him. Our wise guy director was hip to the fact that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes it symbolizes something else entirely. Thus, Keyes is a repository for Wilder’s ill-concealed misogyny, and also provides Wilder with the framework for a naughty boy sketch of a repressed gay romance.
In her second scene, Stanwyck plays Phyllis just as nervously as she did before going into the “speed limit” patter. This is a telling choice because practically all of her other characters are seasoned manipulators—unless Stanwyck means here to suggest that Phyllis is such an evil genius that her feigned uncertainty is so expert that it looks real (this is a highly tricky area Stanwyck is operating in, a kind of actor’s shell game to keep us as off-balance as her dupe, Walter). Phyllis reveals that she’s a native Californian, “born and raised in Los Angeles.” Many writers have commented that Phyllis obviously hates Los Angeles, but the way Stanwyck plays this line doesn’t really read that way to me. When she says “born and raised in Los Angeles,” her eyes gleam in an uncontrolled manner, like a little girl trying to please her daddy. They could be gleaming with hate, but it looks like pleasure, too. Then again, as we soon learn, Phyllis Dietrichson has a twisted relationship with pleasure, and this relationship is what makes the performance so modern, so much a leap forward from Cain’s vivid but finally rather cardboard boogie-man tootsie.
Speaking of her husband, Phyllis says, “Sometime we sit here all evening and never say a word to each other.” Stanwyck uses that flat, foggy Brooklyn tone in which “other” becomes “oth-uh,” and it’s hard to decide if the sound is Claudette Colbert classy or Susan Hayward guttural. It’s really somewhere in between, in that grey, indeterminate area where Stanwyck creates and disturbs our expectations. No doubt Phyllis does spend empty evenings like this with her husband, but she isn’t providing us with a real glimpse of her life; it’s an act for Walter. At bottom, this Phyllis is the kind of sociopath who can’t feel anything about anything except her own sick urges, and so Stanwyck empties out her arsenal of man-manipulation and comes up with this unsettlingly artificial mantrap, a kind of void, no soul inside. Phyllis lives in her head and in front of her mirror, and the rest is just show for the shadows surrounding her.
Stanwyck’s face is made up so heavily that the effect is as unflattering as the Rumpelstiltskin gold of that wig, but Wilder allows her a white sweater so tight you can see her bra underneath it for the clincher seduction scene in Walter’s apartment. This contrast of bad wig and revealing sweater makes her an angel of death under electric light outside his door, a creature of Los Angeles. When he wishes he had something fancy to give her to drink, she says, “Bourbon is fine, Walter,” in a tired but grateful voice. Phyllis likes sex, and she hasn’t been getting much of it at home; she might even be going without entirely (and Stanwyck could probably relate to this).
Mixing their drinks, Walter talks about some women who didn’t get away with murdering their husbands, and as he does, Wilder gives Stanwyck a close-up where she unveils the monster Phyllis, obsessed by her own preoccupations—not a leopard, as in the Cain book, but a human animal that needs to go back to the warehouse, or the nuthouse, for repairs. As with Stella Dallas, Stanwyck takes the basic material of this character and deepens it. She brought a needed human dimension, among many other things, to Stella, and she also brings this dimension to Phyllis, but she’s wrestling a tougher demon here. We can trust that Stanwyck knows exactly what she’s doing, but she’s never going to show you all her cards in this movie.
Walter talks about a woman who was executed for the murder of her husband. Lost in her fantasies, Phyllis says, “Perhaps it was worth it to her.” Stanwyck’s voice here is sensible, hushed, but uncommonly forceful; she’s been saving this voice for the moment when it will scare us most. After this, though, Stanwyck gives us a few clues to what might really be happening inside Phyllis. When Walter suggests she divorce her husband, she says, “He wouldn’t give me a divorce,” in a fast, irritated tone that sounds like Phyllis is totally sure on this one point. Mr. Diet-richson beefs about her buying things; he had money when he married her, but that has dwindled. “And I wanted a home,” Phyllis sneers, disgusted at her own momentary weakness (this, too, sounds genuine).
She was the nurse for Dietrichson’s first wife, and she says she pitied him after the wife died. During those empty nights when they say nothing—or not much—to each other, Phyllis must always be returning to her fantasies of killing him, for we see her doing so in Walter’s apartment with a diseased kind of Robert Ryan-like pride in her plans. “Walter, I don’t want to kill him, I never did,” she claims, so unconvincingly as to be ridiculous, but then she turns the screws on her victim by admitting, “Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face.” She says this in a slightly agitated voice that lets us know that this dominatrix doesn’t mind switching to masochism every now and then (here, too, unavoidably, is a reminder of the drunk, abusive Frank Fay slapping Stanwyck’s face in public, at Hollywood nightclubs—for an audience).
Phyllis says she’s thought of leaving her drunk husband in the car with the motor still running and closing the garage door, like Bette Davis in Bordertown (1935) or Ida Lupino in They Drive By Night (1940). Phyllis is obscenely excited by the idea of this murder, and her excitement is sexual, so that Stanwyck is actually closer, at times, to Cain’s Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, wanting to rut with her new man practically on the corpse of her dead husband.
Walter puts his large hand on Phyllis’s white sweater and the camera pulls discreetly back; his voiceover says that she shed some light tears. When we get back to them in that room, they’ve definitely had sex, and it was probably pretty good in its animal way. Walter says yes, they’ll kill her husband. Phyllis gets up off the couch, her face registering, “OK, it worked,” but also a bit of nervousness; she isn’t facing Walter at this moment, so this nervousness of hers is at least partly real. So many of Stanwyck’s performances are about the almost non-existent dividing line between acting an emotion and really feeling it. She knew that the body and even the mind can’t really know when you’re “acting,” which is why acting can be such a dangerous and depleting profession, an art form based on tricking yourself so convincingly that the “tricks” often dissolve, and what’s left are real tears and real anger—even real happiness—on top of something troublingly hollowed-out.
We meet Dietrichson (Tom Powers), and he does seem like a crab, to say the least. He still treats Phyllis like an employee rather than a wife. Alfred Hitchcock often employed the same technique as Wilder uses here, getting us to identify with a would-be murderer and then confronting us with the moral implications of our identification. Wilder isn’t making this picture to ponder questions of ethics, of course. He just wants to put on a good, “different” show and entertain an audience with depravity and its consequences, but Stanwyck is stalking bigger game.
When Walter insists to Phyllis that Mr. Dietrichson needs to die in a train accident in order for her to get a doubled insurance payout, Stanwyck makes Phyllis seem tickled by his enthusiasm, almost touched. She looks at him for a moment as if to say, “Wait a minute … are you my soulmate or something?” She does love Walter, in her way, while they’re planning the murder and shortly afterwards, because he’s made her fantasy real, and he seems like such an ideal partner that she can barely contain her admiring surprise at his resourcefulness.
When they meet at a supermarket to discuss their game plan, Phyllis bites her lip a bit to show that she’s nervous, but she completely drops this act when Walter leaves her. The camera catches the monster Phyllis again, peering out like some hungry beast from behind boxes of food. Walter mentions that from now on it’s “straight down the line” for both of them, and the monomaniacal Phyllis becomes obsessed with this phrase, repeating it, with variations, for the rest of the film, like a sinister mantra. Leading her husband to his car, she mockingly calls him “honey,” and when he mentions coming back from his class reunion, Phyllis’s mouth purses slightly, as if she’s thinking, “You won’t be back, buster.” She stops the car and honks the horn, which is Walter’s cue to strangle the husband. As he does this, Wilder gives Stanwyck a justly famous close-up to show how Phyllis reacts.
At first her mouth is open, excitedly, but then it closes again, tightly. In her eyes, there’s a nearly unreadable look. It is at once childlike and sad, and there’s a bit of self-recognition and a bit of satisfaction—and a bit of disappointment that the whole job is over, for she had so enjoyed the planning. “What comes next?” she seems to think, with the melancholy of a serial killer who knows that they can only really get off every once in a great while. There’s even some joy in her face. So many things are blended together in this close-up that it has the visual effect of a full orchestra playing at full blast—probably something by Mahler.
Stanwyck takes you through every gradation of what a sociopath like Phyllis feels. Just how did she do this? It took craft, of course, and planning. I can only hope that she killed off Frank Fay in her head, and maybe Al Jolson—and every other man who did her dirt. But she needed to make a large imaginative leap here, too; anyone is capable of murder, if provoked, but some rare people need no prompting. Phyllis wants the money, as does Walter, but that’s not why she does this, ultimately; she does it to satisfy urges that no animal has. She is the embodiment of a human plague, and it comes to us during the middle of a world war that would leave us with no illusions about the depths of human evil. Many of Wilder’s relatives perished in concentration camps, and it doesn’t take much thought to put a Phyllis in that context, a Maria Mandel of LA.
Wilder added a suspenseful scene, where their car doesn’t start right away after Walter stages Dietrichson’s death on the train. He makes another inspired addition when he has Keyes and Phyllis almost collide in Walter’s hallway, with her perilously hidden behind a door. (Cain said afterwards that he wished he had thought of such a scene, yet it’s purely a movie scene because, uncharacteristically, Wilder has thought it through in solely visual terms). The bits with Dietrichson’s daughter Lola don’t work too well, mainly because the actress playing this girl, Jean Heather, isn’t as appealing as she needs to be, but we do learn from her that Phyllis did kill the first Mrs. Dietrichson (there are no murdered children in the Wilder version, which even he probably felt was a bit much).
Lola says that she saw Phyllis in front of the mirror, trying on mourning attire: “There was a look in her eye … I’ll never forget,” she adds. We know that look all too well. In the grocery store again, with sunglasses pressed into her wig, Phyllis talks like a zombie as she keeps Walter tethered to her. Then she takes off the glasses so that we see her overloaded, bleary eyes before she zaps him with an enslaving look and takes her leave. It’s like a bump and grind, and then a move back behind the curtain.
In her last scene, waiting for a showdown in her darkened house, Phyllis is cool and tough. “We’re both rotten,” she admits. Walter says that she’s a little more rotten, but that isn’t true; he has a choice between righteous Keyes and bad apple Phyllis, and he chooses her way. She has no choice; she is what she is. When she throws a cigarette away, poised to go into action and shoot Walter, Stanwyck moves uncannily like a snake—an “Irrawaddy cobra,” as Cain puts it—as she slithers up and fires her gun at her prey.
She hits Walter, but not fatally, and he sidles up to her. She can’t fire the second shot to finish him off. Why? Is it, like she says, because she suddenly feels love for him, the same love she seemed to feel when they were planning to make her treasured murder fantasy a reality? He isn’t buying it. “I’m not asking you to buy, just hold me close,” she whimpers. He shoots her, and she falls limp in his arms in her white dress, a vanquished snake about to shed its skin, embodied by an actress who always makes “sincerity” seem a Byzantine concept. Now you see it, now you don’t.