Double Indemnity

Film noir par excellence. Fred MacMurray, as Walter Neff, staggers into an office, a fresh bullet wound in his side, and proceeds to offer a remarkable confession into a Dictaphone: “I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars. Until a while ago, that is . . .” So begins Billy Wilder's sordid, seminal Double Indemnity, co-scripted by Raymond Chandler, from the novel by James M. Cain. Barbara Stanwyck, as Phyllis Dietrichson, is the double-crossing dame who has drawn Neff into this dire predicament, seducing him into a devious plot to dispose of her husband and collect on the double indemnity clause in his life insurance policy. Things, of course, go dangerously awry, and hot on the trail of the co-conspirators is kindly Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the insurance investigator who is Neff's best friend and colleague. “This shrewd, tawdry thriller is one of the high points of 1940s films . . . Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson is perhaps the best acted and most fixating of all the slutty, cold-blooded femmes fatales of the film noir genre" (Pauline Kael). “Perhaps the best example of Hollywood film noir of the Forties — a pitiless study of human greed, sex, and sadism" (Sadoul, Dictionary of Films). B&W, 35mm. 106 mins.

- - - - - - - - - -
ADDITIONAL SCREENING! Double Indemnity also screens on August 11 and 12.