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.
I agree on most points, Amy. I thought the ending left much to be desired. When I felt the final pages coming and the conclusion just between my fingertips, I felt a sense of dread. However, it wasn’t the dread that is supposed to accompany a noir story. Rather, it was the dread of dissatisfaction, of having invested time into a story that was about to conclude with something that resembled little of noir, at least in my eyes.
ReplyDeleteThe book does its job in titillating the mind of the reader, providing red hearings and multiple suspects to blur conception of who might end up the victor or victim. But, to put it mildly, it blew it. Sure, both Phyllis and Walter end up paying the ultimate price, victims of their own greed, and I suppose Cain thought that would be some type of poetic justice. Instead, it just felt flat and uninspired.
Anyone of your proposed endings would have sufficed. Honestly, I thought that we would find out that the narrator had been dead this whole time, speaking from the grave.
Yes i felt the same way a felt a big disappointment in the ending it just left everything making no sense at all i would of wished a different ending for Phyllis because i though she deserved something worse than what she got . I got a little frustrated i had to actually close the book and toss it in the corner of my room to feel a little happy because the ending was just awful and i do see the point where you say anything would of been better than what M.Cain wrote yes definitely even getting run over by an ice cream truck would of made it better.
ReplyDeleteYes thank you for asking; I thought the ending sucked as well. And I found much humor in your blog post Amy. I agreed with so much of everything you've written here. The ending will most definitely be by comparison to Cain's novel a much better ending in the film version by Chandler and Wildler I'm betting on it, and looking forward to seeing the conclusion of the film Double Indemnity now! I had to laugh some with what you voiced in your last sentence in the second paragraph...truer words to describe your emphasis to your insight is likely unparalleled and not elsewhere to be found.
ReplyDeleteYea I felt the same way. I was expecting a different type of ending. I was hoping that somehow Walter was going to succeed in killing Phyllis. Sadly, it did not happen. I felt like Walter just agreed to commit suicide with Phyllis, just like that. Since its suppose to fall under the film noir genre I expected more from the ending. So disappointed,it was the cake without the candles.
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