The scene is one of the most famous in all of American film. An insurance salesman named Walter Neff comes to a house in Los Angeles to renew an automobile policy, and a woman appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in a towel, a gold anklet glinting on her ankle. She comes down slowly. “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff,” she says. “Forty-five miles an hour.” And he says, “How fast was I going, officer?” And she says, “I’d say about ninety.”
That woman is Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck, the most dangerous woman in the history of film noir. She will seduce Neff, talk him into murdering her husband for the insurance money, and destroy them both. The film is Double Indemnity, released in 1944, and it is the role that made Stanwyck immortal. But getting it to the screen took nearly a decade, a fight with the censors, a blonde wig everybody hated, and a director who asked his star a single, unforgettable question.
The Story Nobody Would Touch
Double Indemnity began as a novella by James M. Cain, serialized in Liberty magazine in 1936. Cain based it on a real murder, the 1927 killing of Albert Snyder in Queens, New York, by his wife Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray, a case Cain had covered as a journalist. In Cain’s story, an insurance salesman falls for another man’s wife and agrees to help her kill her husband so they can collect on a policy with a double indemnity clause, which doubles the payout if the death is accidental.
Hollywood wanted the story at once, and the censors would not allow it. It was first submitted to the Production Code Administration in 1935, and its head, Joseph I. Breen, rejected it outright, warning that the leading characters were murderers who cheated the law, that the story dealt improperly with an illicit relationship, and that the details of a cold-blooded murder were shown too clearly. For eight years, the story sat on the shelf, officially unfilmable.
It took a young director named Billy Wilder to rescue it. Wilder, who had come to Hollywood from Europe and made his name as a screenwriter, saw something nobody else did: not a sordid crime tale but a tragedy about greed and desire, told with a cold, clear eye. The producer Joseph Sistrom brought the property to Wilder, and Wilder took it on as only his third film as a director. First, though, he had to get it past the censors, and that meant changing the ending. In Cain’s novella, the two lovers commit suicide together, and suicide was forbidden by the Production Code. Wilder and his co-writer would have to find another way for the guilty to pay.
A Mouse or an Actress?
Wilder’s first choice for Phyllis was Barbara Stanwyck, by then the highest-paid woman in America. But Stanwyck hesitated. She had spent years playing heroines, and Phyllis was an out-and-out killer, a woman who murders her husband and then betrays her lover. She was afraid of what the role would do to her career, and she told Wilder so.
Wilder listened, and then he asked her the question that changed her mind. “I love the script and I love you,” she had said, “but I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out killer.” And Wilder looked at her and said, “Well, are you a mouse or an actress?” Stanwyck answered, “Well, I hope I’m an actress.” Wilder said, “Then do the part.” And she did, and she was grateful to him for the rest of her life.
Stanwyck understood at once that Phyllis was not a villain in the old sense. She was a woman who wanted what she wanted and was willing to pay for it, and the film’s power comes from the fact that we understand her, even as we recoil from her. Wilder knew she could make Phyllis human without making her sympathetic. That is the hardest trick in acting, and she pulled it off.
The Blonde Wig
Wilder dressed Stanwyck in a blonde wig, chosen, he said, to complement her ankle bracelet and to make her look as sleazy as possible, a signal that Phyllis was a phony, that even her emotions were fraudulent. The trouble was that the wig looked terrible, and everyone on the set knew it.
Paramount’s production head, Buddy DeSylva, took one look and said, “We hired Barbara Stanwyck, and here we get George Washington.” Wilder insisted the wig was deliberate. But a week into filming he came to consider it a mistake, and by then too much had been shot to remove it. He later called it the biggest mistake of his career.
The irony is that the wig has become part of the film’s legend, the one thing people complain about in a performance that is otherwise flawless. Phyllis is a woman performing respectability, performing desire, performing grief, and the wig is the costume of that performance. Whether Wilder meant it or not, the blonde hair has become as much a part of Phyllis Dietrichson as the anklet, the uniform of the first great femme fatale of film noir.
The Reluctant Leading Man
Stanwyck was not the only actor who had to be talked into the film. Fred MacMurray, cast as Walter Neff, was then best known for light comedies, and he protested that he was the kind of actor who made little comedies, not murder stories. Wilder talked him into it, and MacMurray later looked back on Neff as one of his greatest roles.
Edward G. Robinson, cast as Barton Keyes, the brilliant claims adjuster who slowly unravels the murder, was a leading man in his own right and was reluctant to accept third billing. He took the part anyway, and his Keyes is the moral center of the film, the one honest man in a story full of liars. His “little man” speech, about the instinct that tells a claims man when something is wrong, is one of the great scenes in American cinema, and his final scene with Neff, lighting a cigarette for a dying man, is the film’s true ending.
Wilder’s usual collaborator, Charles Brackett, with whom he had written eight films, declined to work on Double Indemnity, finding the story too sordid. A friend suggested Raymond Chandler, the great crime novelist, and Wilder agreed. The two men disliked working together, but after several months of friction they produced an Oscar-nominated script, full of the sharpest dialogue either man ever wrote. Chandler even appears in a brief cameo, as a man reading a book outside Keyes’s office.
The Honeysuckle Murder
The plot is a perfect machine, and its cold logic is what makes it terrifying. Neff meets Phyllis when he calls at her house to renew her husband’s automobile policy. She is bored, trapped in a marriage to a much older man, Mr. Dietrichson, and she wants out, with money. Neff, who knows every trick of the insurance trade, devises a plan to make the murder look like an accident: a policy with a double indemnity clause, a staged fall from a train.
The murder is shot with a chilling matter-of-factness. Neff hides in the back seat and strangles Dietrichson while Phyllis drives. He boards the train posing as Dietrichson, on crutches, and jumps off at a prearranged spot, dragging the body onto the tracks. It is a plan that depends on every detail going right, and like all perfect plans in noir, it falls apart. Keyes smells something wrong. Phyllis’s stepdaughter Lola, played by Jean Heather, suspects Phyllis hastened her own mother’s death. Neff begins to see that the woman he killed for is not the woman he thought she was.
The film’s most famous line comes from Neff’s voiceover, the confession he dictates into his office Dictaphone as the story unfolds in flashback: “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” It captures the film’s terrible romance, the way desire can disguise itself as love until it is far too late. Neff thought he was the smartest man in the room. He was the fool, and Phyllis knew it from the first minute.
Straight Down the Line
The Production Code demanded that criminals pay for their crimes on screen. In the climax, Neff confronts Phyllis in her living room, tells her he intends to kill her and blame her young lover, Nino Zachetti, played by Byron Barr, and she shoots him in the shoulder. Wounded, he walks slowly toward her, daring her to shoot again. She cannot. He takes the gun, and as she holds him close, he says, “Goodbye, baby,” and shoots her twice.
Wilder had originally filmed a further ending, in which Neff is arrested and executed in the gas chamber. But he cut it, partly because the censors found it too gruesome, and partly because he realized it was unnecessary. The film already had its ending: Neff, dying, dictating his confession, and Keyes arriving to hear it. “I love you too,” Neff says, and collapses. It is a love story, in the end, but not the one anyone expected.
Wilder had gotten the story past Breen not by softening it but by making its consequences absolute. Nobody gets away with anything in Double Indemnity. That was the price of admission, and Wilder paid it gladly.
Seven Nominations, No Statues
Released in September 1944 to strong reviews and strong business, Double Indemnity received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Wilder, Best Actress for Stanwyck, and Best Screenplay. It won none of them. The ceremony was dominated by Going My Way, Paramount’s other big picture of the year. Stanwyck lost the Best Actress award to Ingrid Bergman for Gaslight, her third nomination without a win.
History has corrected the record. Double Indemnity is now regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, the defining work of film noir. Wilder himself considered it his best film in terms of having the fewest scripting and shooting errors. The film’s reputation has only grown, and with it, the reputation of Stanwyck’s performance.
For Stanwyck, the nomination was her third, and the loss was her third, but the role gave her something no Oscar could: immortality. Ask a filmgoer today to name a Barbara Stanwyck role, and the answer, more often than not, is Phyllis Dietrichson. The blonde wig, the anklet, the voice like honey over broken glass: it is the image that endures.
Why Phyllis Endures
Phyllis Dietrichson endures because Stanwyck refused to play her as a monster. She played her as a woman, bored, greedy, and ruthless, but a woman nonetheless, with wants and fears and a clear-eyed understanding of how the world works. She does not ask for sympathy, and Stanwyck does not ask for it on her behalf. That is what makes her frightening. We recognize her. We have all wanted something we should not have, and Phyllis is the version of ourselves that went ahead and took it.
The performance also endures because it was a turning point for Stanwyck herself. Before Double Indemnity, she was a great actress. After it, she was a legend, the woman who had dared to play the most unsympathetic character in Hollywood and made her unforgettable. The mouse-or-actress question was never asked of her again. She had answered it, on screen, in a blonde wig, with murder in her heart.
The film still plays like a warning and a confession at once, and at its center is a woman at the top of a staircase, wrapped in a towel, telling a man she has just met exactly how fast he was going. Ninety miles an hour, straight down the line, toward the end of everything. That is Phyllis Dietrichson. That is Barbara Stanwyck. And that is why we are still watching.