He didn’t get the money or the woman; we get the facts

Silver and Ursini, who are named here as “noir authorities”, include a bibliography of dozens and dozens of books about not only the film itself and the creative people around it, but also the 1927 murder case on which it was based plus the whole cinematic genre, from proto-noir to neo-noir. So for anyone not so well read, what do the two authors offer that’s new?

An immediate surprise for The Budapest Times’ not-so-well-versed viewer is that “Double Indemnity” was intended to have a climax in which dogged insurance claims manager Barton Keyes goes to witness the gas-chamber execution of his salesman Walter Neff, but the 20-minute footage was cut before the first preview and no longer exists.

This section was called “Sequence E” by the filmmakers, and two photos from the studio set are reproduced showing the scene at the gas chamber, with everyone suitably grim-faced. The authors wonder if the footage was ever seen outside of a studio screening room, and why it was deemed unsuitable as a dramatic climax. This filmic mystery, then, remains one.

Paramount Pictures had sent “Double Indemnity” director Billy Wilder, producer Joe Sistrom and other film-makers to inspect death rows at San Quentin prison, just north of San Francisco, and another near Tucson, Arizona, for research.

The travelling, set construction and shooting of “Sequence E” atually cost more than 45 times the amount spent by New York State on January 12, 1928 to gas to death Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Judd Gray, the two murderers whose cold-blooded but botched disposal of Ruth’s husband Albert Snyder was dubbed the “crime of the century” at the time.

Their arrest and trial after using a sash weight, wire and nail to bludgeon and choke Albert became a tabloid sensation, then a play, a magazine fiction, a novella by James M. Cain that was bought by Hollywood in 1943 and finally the lauded film.

Silver and Ursini do have some questionable assertions as to why this ending was discarded. One, that it was too forlorn. Another, that when the wounded murderer Neff, played by Fred MacMurray, made his confession into a Dictaphone and collapsed after Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson, appeared, audiences already knew that the ambulance and police were on the way, and the likely outcome. This ending or Sequence E? We could go either way.

A vexation for viewers has always been that fairly obvious wig atop fellow murderer and femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (played by Barbara Stanwyck). Two side-by-side publicity photos here show both her and Marlene Dietrich modelling the same hairpiece, Dietrich in Warner Brothers’ production “Manpower” in 1941, three years before Stanwyck. As “Double Indemnity” Executive Producer Buddy DeSylva remarked: “We paid for Barbara Stanwyck and we got George Washington.”

The Stanwyck photo also has her wearing a tight, pale sweater that noir fashion observer Kimberly Truhler observed: “The sweater is subtle but still overtly sexy, revealing her bra beneath it. The cardigan caused such a commotion that even during filming in 1943, Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky said to Stanwyck, ’But the sweater. The sweater! How did the Hays Office ever let that get by?’”

As any respectable cinephile knows, under the leadership of Will H. Hays, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted the Production Code in 1930 and began rigidly enforcing it in 1934. The code spelled out acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States, and from 1934 to 1954 the rules were closely identified with Joseph Breen, the administrator appointed by Hays.

Silver and Ursini tell of the challenges posed by the immorality of “Double Indemnity”, though co-screenwriters Wilder and Raymond Chandler were able to get round morality czar Breen, who intervened only a little, seeking minor changes.

As for the wig, Wilder apparently hedged, saying he wanted Stanwyck to look as sleazy as possible, but he also remarked: “Mistake there. Big mistake. I wanted her blonde. Blondes have more fun… and I wanted an ice-cold look like that.. I was the first one to see the mistake after we were shooting. But when the picture is half-finished, after I shot four weeks with Stanwyck… I can’t reshoot four weeks of stuff… Fortunately it didn’t hurt the picture.”

Wilder’s screenwriting partnership with Chandler came about because Wilder’s regular collaborator Charles Brackett needed a psychological break (he would return to co-write the 1946 “The Lost Weekend“), and Cain was unavailable to adapt his book.

The Wilder-Chandler relationship has been picked over many times before; the strange mismatch of the WASPy “The Big Sleep” novelist, gloomy, awkward and antisocial, married to a woman much older than himself, and on the wagon from his alcoholism; and Wilder, the ex-taxi dancer Jewish-Austrian emigré, an extroverted wit, who often interrupted their work day so he could chat on the phone with his girlfriends or go off for his elongated martini-with-three-olives lunches. It’s no secret that they got on each other’s nerves as they wrote.

The book has a photo of Chandler’s don’t-blink cameo, sitting on a bench in the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company where Keyes and Neff work. It looks like an actual office but is a very realistic studio set. Another photo shows the actual house on Quebec Drive in the Hollywood Hills that posed as the home of the Dietrichsons. It still looks basically the same today.

In reality, nearly all the filming was done at Paramount, with a couple of other short exceptions being a set-up shot of Jerry’s Market, and MacMurray walking in Kingsley Drive with silent footsteps, the famous “walk of a dead man”. Also, very briefly, a bowling alley.

Filming apparently went smoothly with no ego stuff. Warner Brothers star Robinson was happy with third billing, though his name was prominent, and his pay cheque. The scene where Keyes hangs around in the corridor outside Neff’s apartment while Phyllis is hiding behind the outward-opening door just a couple of metres away is truly suspenseful.

One question while rewatching (and not in the book): Neff hides on the floor in the back seat of the Dietrichson car as Phyllis prepares to drive her doomed husband to the railway station. On the way, Neff will kill him from behind in a dark street. By this stage hubby has a foot in plaster, so supposing he had thrown his crutches in the back, and surely seen Neff? He didn’t.

How long did principal photography take? What were the budget and eventual cost? When did MacMurray keep blowing his lines? How many of its seven 1945 Academy Award nominations did it win? (None.) How important were Edith Head’s costumes and Hungarian Miklós Rózsa’s musical score? Lighting, design, reviews and public reception, release date –

Silver and Ursini tell, though, as we said, many facts are already known, some perhaps not.

The writing style varies occasionally, with one chapter fairly straight (by Silver or Ursini?) and the next chapter noticeably more sardonic (by Ursini or Silver?). And things get a bit heavy at the end when they look at the influence of “Double Indemnity” on the burgeoning noir movement and talk of diegesis and a semiotician (look them up, like we did).

Film and book, book and film – double the insurance against malaise.