question 5 and 8

     As I read the zero draft questions for Double Indemnity, two of the questions just popped right out at me. The first question that grabbed my attention was the lone man walking with crutches, and the other was the one about relationships. Here is my try at answering these questions to the best of my ability. I will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as I see it.

    A lone man walking with crutches approaches the camera. He is lit from behind so all we see of him is his body covered in black. Who is this person? I believe this person represents both Mr. Nirdlinger and Mr. Huff. I feel this way because when we see Mr. Nirdlinger with crutches, he is on his way to the train station. The next time we see a scene with a man with crutches Mr. Huff is impersonating Mr. Nirdlinger as he is getting on the train. Both of these men are at one time the same person, be it pretend or real. Why is the shadowed man at the beginning of the film? I think it is an important image to have at the beginning of the film, because it gives you a sense of foreboding and it raises your curiosity. It makes you think. Who is this guy? What part does he play in the movie? It gives you more reasons to be drawn into the movie as you try to answer these questions. You make more of a connection to everything that is going on in the movie.

   The next question that grabbed my attention was the one where it states, “Certain critics have interpreted the film version of Double Indemnity as an indictment of heterosexual relationships. What details from the film portray the relationships between men and women as duplicitous and destructive”? For me I can answer this question with the two scenes that stand out in my mind. The first scene is where we get our first look at Phyllis. She is standing at the top of the stairs wearing nothing more then a towel wrapped around her. We have Walter at the bottom looking up. If this isn’t an obvious attempt for her to show what she has and to get the guy to want a closer look at what he is missing then I don’t know my seduction scenes. Then when she dresses and comes down the stairs, she is wearing a flirty skirt and an anklet which draws attention to her ankle. Showing your ankle in those days bordered on very improper behavior. The next scene that I think shows a duplicitous relationship between Phyllis and Walter is the scene where Phyllis shows up at Walter’s apartment with a very flimsy excuse. She says he left his hat at the house, but she doesn’t have the hat with her. When she comes in and takes off her coat, she is wearing a tight top and says her husband won’t be home until late. To me this feels strongly like a back-handed invitation.

blog 3 The Ending

Now that we all finished reading the book “Double Indemnity” by James M. Cain, I have one question to ask everyone. Did you think that the ending was as bad as I did or did you actually like it? For me the ending was sadly disappointing. Walter tried to kill Phyllis and didn’t succeed. He ends up in the hospital where he tells Mr. Keyes everything. Mr. Keyes then allows him to escape by booking passage for him on a ship, telling him if he is caught the insurance company would prosecute him to the full extent of the law. While Walter is on the ship, he runs into Phyllis and through her finds out that their story is in the papers. While they are looking out over the back of the ship, they notice a shark is trailing the ship. Phyllis then tells Walter that she is planning on killing herself by jumping off the ship into the water. I guess that Walter likes this plan so much he decides that he is going to do this as well. The very ending of the book has Walter writing at his desk in his cabin as he waits for Phyllis to join him so they can go commit suicide together. She wants to wait until the moon rises so she can see the sharks fin cutting through the water. The very last words in the book are “the moon.”

   I felt that this ending was horrible. A better ending would have been Walter killing Phyllis and then having Mr. Keyes kill Walter. Anything would have been better than the ending James M. Cain had written. I can see why Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder changed the ending in the movie. If I was watching the movie and it had the books ending in it, I would have thrown something at the screen and demand my money back. You have no real sense of justice in the book. The characters get away and decides, “hey since everyone knows what we did, we might as well just jump off this ship and die“.

    For a film noir ending, it lacks all types of things. There is no sense of justice. You feel like it was all just wrong on so many levels. It is the most unsatisfying ending to a book I have ever read, and I have read a lot of books in my time. The detective Mr. Keyes, who is the one to uncover it all, just gives the bad guy a pass and says run free and don’t let us catch you or I will have to do what I should be doing now. A better ending to the book would have been Keyes booking passage on the ship for Walter then hiding out on the ship, then killing him and tossing his body overboard. Now that would have been a wonderful ending. I can only hope that the ending of the movie is going to be better then the ending of the book.

Double Indemnity

I have just finished reading the first part of the book “Double Indemnity” by James M. Cain, and I can say that for me it is a good book so far. It is about an insurance salesman who falls in love with the wife of a client, and he and the wife conspire together to get rid of her husband. I can see where parts of this book could actually be considered film noir. If you don’t believe me, just read the article “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton.

In the article it says “film noir is [crime] from within; from the point of view of the criminal.” The criminal in the book is the insurance salesman, and the book is written from his point of view. The first sentence says, “I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.” Right away you know he is an insurance salesman. In another part you read, “Phyllis (the wife), you seem, to think that because I can call it on you, you’re not going to do it. You are going to do it, and I’m going to help you.” So the plan is set to commit murder.

As I continued to read the book, I was caught up in an interesting part of the book that seemed to me to illustrate another important point in the article. “It is the presence of crime which gives film noir its most constant characteristic. “The dynamism of violent death” is how Nino Frank evoked it, and the point is well taken.” In the book the couple plots to make it look like the husband fell off a train so the wife can get twice the amount of money on the insurance policy. On page 44, Mr. Huff (the insurance salesman) says, “I raised up, put my hand over his mouth, and pulled his head back. He grabbed my hand in both of his. The cigar was still in his fingers. I took it with my free hand and handed it to her. She took it. I took one of the crutches and hooked it under his chin. I won’t tell you what I did then. But in two seconds he was curled down on a seat with a broken neck and not a mark on him except for a crease right over his nose from the crosspiece of the crutch.”

All good film noir needs a femme-fatal in it. In the article written by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, it states that, “Finally, there is ambiguity surrounding the woman: the femme fatale who is fatal to herself. Frustrated and deviant, half predator, half prey, detached yet ensnared, she falls victim to her own traps.” The femme-fatale in this book is Mrs. Nirdlinger also known as Phyllis. On page 5 it says, “She was maybe thirty-one or -two with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blond hair. She was small and had on a suit of blue house pajamas”. When she first meets Mr. Huff, she is wearing her pajamas. She pretends to be this helpless little creature, and I have a feeling we are going to find out she is anything but helpless. With all of these fascinating details in the book, you can see how it shares some traits with film noir.