PERSONAL FAVES: Double Indemnity

I think, if I were called upon to explain the term film noir to someone who had no understanding of cinema, I would simply sit them down and show them 'Double Indemnity'. I wanted to avoid starting this review with a big fat piece of opinionism - something I do too often as it is - along the lines of " 'Double Indemnity' is the ultimate film noir". Particularly when film noir boasts some many great examples of itself. But I really do believe that 'Double Indemnity' ticks all of the boxes.

To this end, and without mentioning the movie I was going to be writing about, I asked a number of friends and colleagues: "What does film noir mean to you?" There's a pretty good catch-all definition in an article on GreenCine: "Film noir is the flipside of the all-American success story ... It's about what people want, how badly they want it and how far they'll go to get it." I expected a checklist of genre tropes, stock characters and visual motifs. I expected femmes fatale, hapless dupes, tenacious investigators, rain-slicked streets, blinking neon, shadowy cinematography; lust, lies, greed, corruption; blackmail, theft, betrayal, murder. Random twists of fate. Carefully planned crimes unravelling. Webs of deceit tying in-too-deep anti-heroes in knots. Points of no return long passed. Redemption just out of reach. Abject cynicism vis-a-vis the human condition.

I expected, in other words, a list I could easily check 'Double Indemnity' off against. It's got the quinessential film noir plot to begin with: disillusioned protagonist Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is persuaded by sultry siren Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to bump off her husband (Tom Powers), all the better to pocket the proceeds of the titular insurance policy. It's got a dogged investigator: claims adjuster Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a man who can sniff out a lie at thirty paces and even if he can't, figures it for a big fat fib anyway and goes after the truth like a bloodhound.

Neff knows that it's Keyes he's got to outwit if he's going to get away with it. The murder has to look like an accident. And definitely not like suicide. Insurance company boss Norton (Richard Gaines), aghast at the potential payout, tries to browbeat the fiesty Phyllis by suggesting that her husband topped himself, therefore invalidating the policy. It doesn't work, and Keyes roundly mocks him after Phyllis storms out:

Keyes: You know, you ought to take a look at the statistics on suicide some time. You might learn something about the insurance business.
Norton: Mr Keyes, I was raised in the insurance business.
Keyes: Yeah, in the front office. Come now, you've never read an actuarial table in your life have you? Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by colour, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day; suicide, how committed: by poision, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps; suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poision, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, alkaloid, protein and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But Mr Norton, of all the cases of record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train.

As acutely as he proves Norton wrong, Keyes determines to uncover the truth of Dietrichson's death. He's not the only one who wants answers. Lola (Jean Heather), Dietrichson's daughter from a previous marriage, isn't buying the official line either. Particularly since she has it in mind that Phyllis was instrumental in her mother's death. Neff's problems pile up: not only is Keyes edging closer to the truth, but Neff himself is having to get close to Lola just to make sure she doesn't go running her mouth off to the wrong people. Then Phyllis gets wind that Neff and Lola are getting cosy and draws the wrong conclusion.

Here's another tenet of the genre I was expecting my impromptu survey to reveal: the old "hell hath no fury" scenario.

Yes, I was sure that 'Double Indemnity' ticked all the boxes. In fact, the only departure I anticipated would be the milieu that many noirs operate in - the criminal underworld - but even then 'Double Indemnity' replaces this with the everyday crimes of regular joes telling the occasional porky on their claims form. If anything, I thought, 'Double Indemnity' emerges as more cynical for playing out against a backdrop of the insurance business than against a world of casinos, speakeasys and houses of ill-repute.

So I was surprised (and delighted) that when I asked my friends and colleagues about film noir, they avoided the obvious and talked instead about the atmosphere of the films; the mood; the emotional response. They talked about an all-pervading sense of inevitability, of characters caught up in situations they can no longer control, rushing headlong towards a bad end. They talked about believability, about characters who do the wrong thing or get ensnared by the wrong people because of weakness or vulnerability or one bad decision (usually made because they see it as a short cut to money or sexual fulfillment). They talked about characters trying to escape from the things they've done, hurtling past the point at which they might have been able to reverse their actions, having to construct ever more elaborate lies and/or alibis, all the time making it worse for themselves.

They talked about how film noir lingers in the mind: images and narratives and characters that stay with you for days, weeks, months. How the key scenes often hinge on a one-in-a-million, unplanned-for, never-saw-it-coming bit of bad luck - something that even the canniest criminal mind could never plan for because the only thing you can never pre-suppose is the cosmic coin toss of whether your luck turns out good or bad in any given situation. How film noir, with all the illusions and desires and primal urges that drive its anti-heroes to the wrong decisions, only to be undone by that one forgotten detail, that one unexpected twist, is kind of like life.

So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe 'Double Indemnity' isn't the ultimate film noir. With so many great examples from the 40s and 50s - when the best of American story-driven genre cinema was married to the chiaroscuro expressionism of a melange of European filmmakers who had fled to the States to escape rise of Naziism - maybe it's more a case of any film noir being the ultimate film noir. It's those just-like-life moments of almost poetic defeatism, of hopes being dashed and a world-weary understanding bleeding into gap that's left, that sum up film noir. Moments so resonant that you don't even have to name the film; they almost exist autonomously.

Moments like Alida Valli walking past Joseph Cotten in the graveyard. John Garfield looking up from a dropped tube of lipstick rolling along the floor to the hourglass figure of the girl he'll kill for. Humphrey Bogart ironically describing an artefact that's inspired murder and deceit as "the stuff that dreams are made of". Robert Mitchum setting eyes on Jane Greer and knowing that he's in for a world of trouble but unable to help himself.

And Fred MacMurray, gut shot and painfully recording his confession - his Calvary the bland interiors of his office - coming out with a line that pretty much sums up film noir: "I killed him. I killed him for money. And for a woman. I didn't get the money. I didn't get the woman."

Such is life.

Little Caesar

You can tell a lot about a gangster film by its dialogue. Ideally it should be terse, quotable, make poetry of profanity and bristle with barely-below-the-surface aggression.

Some examples:

"I'm a mook? Wassa mook? You can't call me a mook." - 'Mean Streets'

"Now go home and get your fuckin' shinebox." - 'Goodfellas'

"Never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on, in five seconds flat, if you feel the heat coming round the corner." - 'Heat'

Now here's a line from 'Little Caesar':

"What a fine pickle we're in."

Excuse me?!? A fine freakin' pickle? Did these tommy-gun-toting bad boys all of a sudden astrally project from the gin joints and shadowy back alleys of Chicago to the less-than-mean-streets of a Noel Coward play? A spot of robbery and murder before we break out the cucumber sandwiches, what ho, chaps? More tea, Rico? What next? Tony Montana saying, "Allow me to introduce you to my diminutive companions"? Michael Corleone opining, "I say, old bean, it doesn't do to trust anybody outside of the family"?

A fine pickle, indeed! Okay, I wasn't expecting "mook" and "shinebox" and "motherfucker" every other line, but this was 1930 and pre-Hayes Code and the dialogue could have been edgier.

So, moving on from Francis Faragoh's stilted screenplay (an adaptation of William R. Burnett's novel), how does 'Little Caesar' stand up nearly 80 years after it debuted?

I'm loathe to badmouth the acting - allowances have to be made for films of a certain era where performance styles still carried over a lot of baggage from the artificiality of theatre and the exaggerated expressivity of silent movies - but it has to be said: with one honourable exception, the acting in 'Little Caesar' is as creaky, stilted and generally shoddy as the script. Leaden, inelegant line readings. Awkward physicality. The scenes between Rico's lily-livered friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jnr) and his twinkletoes girlfriend Olga (Glenda Farrell) are nauseatingly melodramatic.

So what makes 'Little Caesar' a classic? It's not as if it were the first gangster film, or the first to elevate villain to protagonist. It does, however, represent the first example I can think of where a gangster film charts a rise-and-fall narrative arc. Director Mervyn LeRoy shoots for the moon in terms of structure, incident and narrative development, a scant 77 minutes taking small time thug Rico (Edward G. Robinson) from gas station stick-up merchant to right-hand-man to an established Chicago mob boss, a man whose rule he deposes. The gang now his, Rico unflinchingly despatches one of his own when the dumb shmuck in question develops a bad case of moral conscience and takes himself off to see the priest. His death, gunned down on the cathedral steps in what is perhaps cinema's earliest depiction of a drive-by, is as iconic as it is shocking.

Rico also finds himself at daggers drawn with Joe, once his buddy and partner in crime, now gone soft and more interested in establishing himself as one half of a dance act with Olga. But while Joe and Olga are knocking the crowds dead at flashy hotspot The Bronze Peacock, Rico has designs on knocking the joint off.

The robbery itself is another reason 'Little Caesar' endures. The heist was still a-ways off being a veritable genre cliche back in 1930, and no-one would have faulted LeRoy for filming it straight: gunmen bursting in, shots fired, crowds subdued, cash grabbed, tyre-squealing escape made. But no; he does it differently. As differently as I've ever seen a heist scene done. He films both the gang's modus operandi and the reactions of the patrons as a sequence of almost abstract tableaux and effects a series of dissolves between them. It's like watching the bank job set-piece in 'Heat' redone in the style of Chris Marker's 'La Jetee'.

And, ultimately, 'Little Caesar' earns its status as a classic because of Edward G. Robinson. He swaggers, sneers, backstabs and browbeats his way through the story, even maintaining a full-on contempt for authority figures, rival hoods and average joes when his empire crumbles and he goes to ground. He's as unmalleable a character as Edward Fox's Jackal; he presupposes the line in 'Goodfellas' where Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) says of Tommy de Vito (Joe Pesci) that if you beat him with your fists he'd come at you with a knife, if you beat him with a knife he'd come at you with a gun and if you beat him with a gun you'd better finish the job because he'd just keep coming back at you till one of you were dead.

Rico is the gangster genre's original fedora-wearing badass mo' fo'. There's hardly been a single gangster down the decades and under the direction of anyone from Coppola to Scorsese to de Palma who doesn't owe Rico a debt of honour and quite possibly a share of the profits.