Amazon.com Essentials:
Director Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard)
and writer Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)
adapted James M. Cain's hard-boiled novel into this wildly thrilling
story of insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who schemes the
perfect murder with the beautiful dame Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara
Stanwyck): kill Dietrichson's husband and make off with the insurance
money. But, of course, in these plots things never quite go as
planned, and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is the wily insurance
investigator who must sort things out. From the opening scene you
know Neff is doomed, as the story is told in flashback; yet, to the
film's credit, this doesn't diminish any of the tension of the
movie. This early film noir flick is wonderfully campy by
today's standards, and the dialogue is snappy ("I thought you were
smarter than the rest, Walter. But I was wrong. You're not smarter,
just a little taller"), filled with lots of "dame"s and "baby"s.
Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale, and MacMurray, despite a
career largely defined by roles as a softy (notably in the TV series
My Three Sons and the movie The Shaggy Dog), is
convincingly cast against type as the hapless, love-struck
sap. --Jenny Brown
