From the Moment They Met It Was Murder by Alain Silver
Double Indemnity (1944) is a classic of early film noir. In their exhaustive book on the subject, film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini revisit the time and place of Double Indemnity’s making and show that it was pathfinding. They quote a 1944 review in the Hollywood Reporter: Director “Billy Wilder has broken open a door hitherto locked … He has made the hero and heroine of his stark drama a pair of murderers. There’s no gloss to their wrongdoing.” According to the authors, Double Indemnity was recognized at the time as the true beginning of film noir—“they just did not have a name for it yet.”
Silver and Ursini trace Double Indemnity to its origins in a true crime case from the 1920s. The trial of housewife Ruth May Snyder and traveling salesman Henry Judd Gray for murdering her husband for insurance money sparked sizzling headlines, not just in New York where the crime occurred but internationally. Damon Runyon covered the trial for the Hearst syndicate. Snyder and Gray were far less clever than the lead characters in Double Indemnity, memorably played by Barbara Stanwyck and (cast against type) Fred MacMurray. The police had Snyder and Gray in handcuffs within hours.
The sensational trial inspired aspiring novelist James M. Cain to write the book adapted by Wilder into the classic film. Cain attended the trial and eventually became known for his hard-boiled writing, a label he didn’t like. Cain asserted that he merely wrote the way his characters spoke, everyday people whose vividness of speech was undampened by high school English teachers.
Cain found work in Hollywood punching up dialogue as he developed his career as a novelist. Cain favored the underdog, but who was the underdog in Double Indemnity, the suave but cut-rate Walter Neff (McMurray) or the sexually manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck)?
From the Moment They Met it Was Murder provides the authors with an opportunity to cast their net widely—over the oeuvre of Cain, the distinguished and varied career of Billy Wilder, the evolution of film noir and the tendency for art to emulate the tabloids. Double Indemnity is the framework for their network of ideas and associations, a project that brought Wilder and Cain together with screenwriter Raymond Chandler, considered one of the era’s greatest crime novelists. From the Moment They Met it Was Murder is a fascinating tour down some of the less explored lanes of Hollywood history.
From the Moment They Met it Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir is published by TCM/Running Press.
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