Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck get caught up in murder and deception in DOUBLE INDEMNITY
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 14-17, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
The IFC Center is offering a wonderful way to celebrate Valentine’s Day with four screenings of that endlessly romantic noir classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Three years after a brunette Barbara Stanwyck tried to swindle Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a blonde Stanwyck is looking for a way out of her loveless marriage when opportunity knocks in the form of acerbic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck plays alluring, tough-talking femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who falls for Neff and soon convinces him that they should do away with her husband (Tom Powers). They’re both in it “straight down the line,” as she repeats throughout the film, but insurance fraud investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) isn’t so sure that Mr. Dietrichson’s death was an accident. John F. Seitz’s inventive black-and-white cinematography — watch for those Venetian blind shadows — set the standard for the genre. MacMurray, who had to be convinced by Wilder to take the part because he thought he’d be awful in the role, is sensational as Neff, oh-so-cool as he recites his cynical dialogue and lights matches with one hand. He might think he’s tough, but he’s no match for Stanwyck, who rules the roost. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray would go on to successful careers in television in the 1960s, he in My Three Sons, she in The Big Valley. Directed by Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler based on a pulp novel by James Cain, with music by Miklós Rózsa — how’s that for a pedigree? — Double Indemnity, which was nominated for seven Oscars and won none, is screening February 14-17 at 11:00 am at the IFC Center, kicking off the “American Hustlers: Grifters, Swindlers, Scammers & Cheats” series, which continues through May 4 with such other tricky fare as George Roy Hill’s The Sting, David Mamet’s House of Games, Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda, and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon.