Double Indemnity (1944)

Second viewing; first viewed on January 23, 1991.

An insurance salesman gets involved with a client's wife, and, abetted by her, devises a plan to murder her husband and collect a large insurance sum.

Very good criminal drama. There is not much I can add to the existing critical output, of which the TV Guide review is a good sample. Christopher Mulrooney, as usual, offers a slightly offbeat angle. I would only like to point out that this, like so many films, and perhaps ultimately all of them, one way or another, is about blindness. In this particular case, it is not so much that the thing is hard to see, as that its possibility is emotionally inadmissible. It concerns two cases of excessive trust, one by a man toward a woman he loves, and the other by a man toward an employee he likes. The point may be that love or friendly affection are mental constructs, built on imaginary foundations. The film refrains from a radical endorsement of that position by having its characters (the woman and the employee) having second thoughts at some point in the development. Subsequent films in the noir school went all the way. A sociological analysis would map this worldview to the atomized condition of people in a capitalist environment and the reification of money as a necessary component of that condition .

Rating: 83 (down from 90)