Billy Wilder writ. John Seitz music Miklos Rozsa edt. Doane Harrison star. And that her male dupe is betrayed and takes the fall for the crime is de rigeur for the genre. It's an ancient story, older than the Bible and the moralists who wrote it, a mythology from our genes, perhaps.
Double Indemnity is a trial in the court of public opinion.
The use of the dictaphone is more than a visual prop, as Neff adopts the terse narrative style of an office memo to reveal his role in the murder of the oil industry manager Dietrichson and the attempted fraud of the Pacific All Risk insurance company. Fate is a condition of individual intelligence, knowledge of the odds, the mathematics of the perfect crime. In this way the male patsy is invariably an expert, an insider capable of executing his lover's desire with stealth and viral consequence. Walter Neff is just such a man. That's what I suggested.