Dou­ble indemnity

Dou­ble Indem­nity — 1944/Thriller
Adapted & Directed: Billy Wilder
Based on a novel by John Cain.

Plot

The entire story is nar­rated by Wal­ter Neff, a charm­ing insur­ance agent. Phyl­lis is rich man’s wife who hap­pens to meet Neff once in her home. They slowly develop a friend­ship and gets into a rela­tion. They get slowly into a dan­ger­ous and an almost per­fect plan to mur­der the rich man. In turn, they plan to get the insur­ance money and lead a new life.

The plan looks easy but com­pli­cated as much as a big mess. Neff’s boss Bar­ton Keyes, an out­stand­ing insur­ance inves­ti­ga­tor who has a lit­tle guy inside him [intu­ition] lead­ing him to crack any great case. With these ele­ments, what hap­pens is the plot for a per­fect thriller. The story moves in flash­backs from Neff’s view and involves the clash of dif­fer­ent fates of all the char­ac­ters involved. That makes this movie a super thriller.

View

Alfred Hitch­cock movies were the eye opener for me, which stated that black & white movies were not slow movies. There are cer­tain films which move at the speed of a bul­let train [ Tamil exam­ple : Gilli ]. There are many exam­ples of this genre.. Spellbound(1945), The killing(1956), Strangers on a train are few to quote for now. This film is a clas­sic exam­ple of a fast exe­cuted script.

The BGM is an inevitable part of sto­ry­telling — even I remem­ber we used to nar­rate the action films with sounds and BGM.. In fact, even when we fight in child­hood we make sounds [ Dishaaal, Dishyum :) ]. That’s the power of BGM. This movie got the per­fect BGM which enhances the thrill and increases our temp­ta­tion to look for what hap­pens next.

I liked the light and shad­ows part of this thriller. More’shadows’ are used in this film to rep­re­sent the dark­ness of the events involved in the story. Some­how, this movie resem­bles ‘the strangers on a train’. The best part is the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Bar­ton Keyes. He is one of the sparkling and bril­liant char­ac­ters in the story. His dia­logues are rally out­stand­ing and soundly con­vinc­ing. That’s the rea­son I used his dia­logue as quoted in the beginning.

Con­clu­sion

A per­fect thriller for a Sat­ur­day night movie time.

It wasn’t an acci­dent.. it wasn’t a sui­cide.. What it was then ?

–Toto.

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