Tag Archives: film noir

Phantom Lady (1944)

Phantom Lady has one of the most contrived and illogical plots in cinematic history. Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) and his wife have an argument, and he leaves their apartment and goes to a bar. Shortly after, his wife is strangled by Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), with whom she was having an affair. Because there is no evidence connecting him with her murder, the police never suspect him, and so all he has to do is take the trip to Brazil as he already planned to.

But no! He decides that he must make sure that Henderson is suspected of the crime. So, he only pretends to get on the ship going to Brazil so that he can follow Henderson around (he catches up with the ship later by taking a plane to Havana). He sees that Henderson meets a woman (Fay Helm) in a bar, whom he persuades to go to a show with him, inasmuch as he already has tickets. She agrees, and they take a cab. They sit right up front, and it turns out that she is wearing the same unusual hat worn by the star of the show, Miss Montiero (Aurora Miranda). The drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.) takes a fancy to the woman with Henderson and flirts with her.

So, Marlow figures he must bribe the bartender, the cabdriver, and the drummer to say they never saw the woman, thereby depriving Henderson of his alibi. Marlow does not have to bribe Miss Montiero, because her vanity won’t let her admit that someone in the audience wore the same hat that she did, which she apparently disposed of. Of course, other women in the show might have remembered Miss Montiero’s hat, and other members of the band might have noticed the woman in the front row with the hat, but Marlow does not bother to bribe any of them.

As a result, the bartender says he saw Henderson at the bar, but not the woman; and the cabdriver says he picked up Henderson and drove him to the show, but there was no woman with him. And so, without an alibi, Henderson is convicted of murder on the flimsiest of circumstantial cases and sentenced to be executed. However, no one in the movie seems to realize that the bartender and cabdriver have provided Henderson with an alibi anyway. Whether he had a woman with him is irrelevant. For that matter, if Marlow was going to bribe these characters, he should have told them to deny seeing Henderson rather than deny seeing the woman with him. Had he done that, then the woman would be the only one who could provide Henderson with an alibi, and the frantic search for her by Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), Henderson’s secretary, would have made sense.

It gets worse. Although there are only a few weeks until Henderson will be executed, Marlow returns from Brazil and decides to murder the drummer when he sees Carol trying to get information out of him. Even so, there still would be no evidence connecting him with that murder either, except that he picks up Carol’s purse, which she left behind when the drummer became angry, and puts it in a drawer in his apartment.

These do not exhaust the absurdities in this movie, which pile up on top of the ones already discussed, but there is no point in beating a dead horse. And because we immediately become aware of these absurdities as they unfold, watching the movie can be an exasperating experience.

Where Danger Lives (1950) and Other Movies about Doctors, Women, and Money

Recently, I decided to watch Where Danger Lives again.  It’s only a minor film noir, but nevertheless entertaining.  This time through, however, I noticed an attitude often found in the movies toward doctors that choose to go into private practice, especially as it regards their relationship with female patients.  But first things first.

Where Danger Lives begins in a hospital where Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) works as a doctor. He is dedicated to his profession, and so much so that a nurse reprimands him for working too hard (fifteen hours a day). To underscore what a good man Jeff is, his patients are children, with whom he has a terrific bedside manner. He tells a story about Elmer the Elephant to a girl in an iron lung to help her fall asleep, which she does before the story is finished.

Then he chats with a boy, promising that they will have more baseball discussions in the future.  The boy mentions that he knows Jeff will be going away.  The nurse says, in an apologetic tone, that she told him that Jeff will be going into private practice.

We get the sense that there is something wrong with Jeff’s going into private practice, that it means that he values making money more than caring for people. This seems to be what those who produced this movie wanted us to think, for they clearly put in the scene about Jeff’s intention to go into private practice for a reason, even though we never see it come to fruition. Remove that one brief scene with the boy, and the rest of the movie could have been exactly the same, without anyone thinking there was something missing. The point is that Jeff is guilty of shirking his duty to serve the public good for the sake of private greed.

Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan), a nurse, is Jeff’s fiancée. We know that their relationship is wholesome because he regularly gives her a white rose. But that is about to change.  As he is leaving the hospital for the night, he is delayed by an emergency.  A woman has attempted suicide, presumably by taking sleeping pills, since she is unconscious.  The woman is Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue), and when she wakes up, she sees Julie’s white rose and thinks it is for her, saying she likes red roses instead. When Margo grabs Jeff’s hand to thank him for pulling her through, Julie senses something, raising her eyebrows and glancing at Jeff.

As it turns out, Julie’s doubts and suspicions are justified. Just as Jeff is abandoning the children in the hospital, so too does he abandon Julie, breaking a date with her one night so he can be with Margo.  On another night, as he is leaving the hospital, Julie tells him the girl in the iron lung wants him to finish the story about Elmer the Elephant.  He says he doesn’t have time for that girl, and that he hates Elmer the Elephant.  He tells Julie that she should just make up something to end it, like Elephant gets Elephant.  He doesn’t have time for the girl because he has another date with Margo, bringing her a red rose, red being an obvious symbol for lust, the new sin added to the previous one of avarice.

Jeff doesn’t know it, but Margo is married.  He only finds out about this later because Margo has lied to him, telling him that her husband, Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains), who has been away fishing, is her father.  This lie leads to a confrontation between the two men when Jeff shows up one night unexpected. Frederick says, “Margo married me for my money.  I married her for her youth. We both got what we wanted, after a fashion.”  This eventually leads to blows and ultimately to Frederick’s death.

Jeff, who was hit with a fire iron during the fight, believes he accidentally killed Frederick, and he is now suffering from a concussion.  Unable to think straight, he lets Margo talk him into fleeing with her. From that point on, everyone they come into contact with wants money from them. By the time they get to the border, they are broke. But then Margo reveals that for years she has been squirreling her husband’s money away in a Mexican bank in her maiden name. Jeff realizes that it was Margo who murdered her husband, smothering him with a pillow while Jeff was out of the room. She then tries to smother Jeff. Later she shoots him. Then the police shoot her.

Her dying confession exonerates Jeff, who wakes up in a hospital.  It is clear that he and Julie are going to get back together, white rose and all. While nothing is said one way or the other, we can’t help but believe that once he recovers and is no longer a patient in this hospital, he will return to the hospital where he works as a resident much in the way he is returning to Julie. He has presumably learned his lesson about wanting to go into private practice.

As a general rule, movies tend to look favorably on doctors that work in hospitals. That is why we feel good about Dr. McKenna (James Stewart) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) when we find out that he practices at the Good Samaritan Hospital back in Indianapolis.  This is reinforced when we are informed that he and his family traveled to Paris so he could attend a medical convention, definitely a sign of dedication.  After that, they traveled to Morocco for reasons of nostalgia, for he served at an army field hospital during the war and is proud of the contribution he made there.  There are exceptions, of course.  For example, even though Dr. George Harris (Richard Widmark) works in a hospital in Coma (1978), he turns out to be a villain.

With some movies, it is not a matter of working in a hospital as opposed to having a private practice; it is working in the public sector rather than the private sector. In Panic in the Streets (1950), for example, Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) is an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service.  Like Jeff in Where Danger Lives, he works hard.  In the first day he’s had off in six weeks, he gets a call from someone at his office.  It seems that a man who was murdered had the pneumonic plague. Needless to say, this is a serious matter.  The killer needs to be tracked down before he spreads the disease.

However, Reed’s family is struggling financially, owing money at the grocery store, and he is tempted to take a job with an oil company as a medical advisor.  His wife Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes) admonishes him for thinking about such things, telling him how important his job is right now, that he is doing exactly what he planned on doing when he was still in school.  We know he will do the right thing, continuing to work as a dedicated public servant rather than take a job in the private sector, even though his family can barely make ends meet, which isn’t going to get any easier since Nancy is going to have another baby.

In some cases, a doctor gives up a lucrative private practice so he can do medical research, which is what Dr. Steele (George Brent) does in Dark Victory (1939), after performing one last (unsuccessful) brain surgery on Judith Traherne (Bette Davis). It will be less remunerative than his private practice, but he believes his research will be of greater benefit to humanity.

So, what is it about private practice that is so rewarding financially? According to the movies, it is rich women who are hypochondriacs.  And it is always women, mind you, never men.  There is the occasional movie, of course, where a man is a hypochondriac, but I have never seen a movie where a doctor makes a good living by regularly treating rich men who are hypochondriacs.  It is the women that are as foolish as they are wealthy that provide the doctor with a rewarding practice, the reason being that they enjoy the attention of the male doctor with whom they are infatuated.

This is played for laughs in A Day at the Races (1937), where Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush (Groucho Marx) manages to make the wealthy Mrs. Emily Upjohn (Margaret Dumont) dependent on him by convincing her that she is suffering from obscure illnesses and in need of his care.

This is such a cliché that if a doctor is in private practice, the movie will sometimes make it clear that he is nevertheless more interested in contributing to the public good than in making money off such women. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), for example, we learn early in the movie that Dr. Jekyll (Frederic March) has chosen to forgo catering to the Duchess of Densmore, who is a hypochondriac, so he can attend to his charity cases in the free wards.  In the next scene, we see a little girl struggling with her crutches. Thanks to Jekyll’s treatment of her, however, she has been cured, and with a little coaxing, he gets her to give up her crutches and start walking on her own, much to her delight.  This is to show us that Dr. Jekyll is a good man in his role as a doctor before the evil Mr. Hyde shows up.

In Arrowsmith (1931), the title doctor, played by Ronald Colman, wants to be a research scientist like Dr. Gottleib.  When Dr. Gottleib offers to take Arrowsmith with him to the McGurk Institute, Arrowsmith has to turn him down.  He is getting married to Leora (Helen Hayes), and he needs to go into private practice to support the two of them.  Dr. Gottleib is disgusted, saying, “Practice! To give pills to ladies, to hold their hands for them, to make their diets for them.”  Eventually Arrowsmith is able to do the medical research he always wanted to, but only after Leora loses her baby and learns that she can never have children.  Had the baby lived, one suspects that Arrowsmith would have had to continue in private practice.  Later, when Leora dies, this really frees him up to do the research he has always wanted to do, all for the greater good of mankind.

Green for Danger (1946) takes place in a British hospital that treats casualties during WWII.  A nurse reminds the surgeon, played by Leo Genn, how nice he had it in private practice before the war: “Rolls-Royce, lovely ladies.”  She notes that the ladies were happy to be in his consulting room on account of his “wounded stag look that no woman can resist.”  Later she refers to the women “who used to dither in and out of your consulting room in a flutter of checks and eyelashes.”  He says he misses the checks.

In Bad for Each Other (1953), Dr. Tom Owen (Charlton Heston) is pushed by Helen (Lizabeth Scott) to give up public service as a full colonel in the army to become an associate in a health clinic in Pittsburg that treats wealthy women.  As an indication of their strong sexual desires, all the rich women in this movie seem to be having adulterous affairs on a regular basis.  Having gotten a look at what a hunk Tom is, they can’t wait to make an appointment, get naked, and be examined by him.

After examining Lucille, one of his patients, she asks him if she will see him at a social function on Friday.  He says she will, and she says, “I hope you’ll recognize me with my clothes on.”  There is nothing wrong with her, of course, but to play along with the charade, he says he is prescribing “something to quiet your nerves.”  Tom’s nurse, Joan, gives Lucille a knowing look.  She is idealistic and doesn’t approve of Tom’s clientele of wealthy women who have nothing wrong with them.

Part of this movie is set in a coal-mining town, Coalville, to be exact.  Tom’s father and grandfather worked as coal miners.  In some movies about coal miners, like How Green Was My Valley (1941), one gets the sense that there is something honorable about continuing to work in the mines, even when there is a way to get out, so it’s no wonder that Tom’s mother disapproves of the way Tom’s older brother didn’t want to work in the coal mines too.  She doesn’t expect that of Tom, but she believes that, at the very least, he should live in Coalville and be a doctor for the coal miners.  One night there is a big accident in one of the coal mines. After working to save lives, Tom sees the error of his ways, breaks off his engagement with Helen and opens up an office in Coalville.  It is still private practice, but since he intends to treat poor coal miners rather than rich women, that makes it all right.  Joan approves of this change and continues to be his nurse.  We gather they will eventually marry.

In The Citadel (1938), on the other hand, coal mining is depicted quite differently. Dr. Andrew Manson (Robert Donat) starts out with noble aspirations about helping Welsh coal miners with lung conditions, but these miners are an ignorant, ungrateful lot.  They don’t mind having him for a doctor, but they don’t like the medical research he tries to do on the side, so they destroy all his notes and laboratory equipment.  He and his wife Christine (Rosalind Russell) give up and move to London.  He has a hard time making it, but one day he is called upon when a woman’s regular doctor is away.  He is brought to a room where Miss Toppy LeRoy, a rich, beautiful woman, is lying on the floor screaming.  He immediately diagnoses her problem as willful hysteria and slaps her until she stops.  His prescription for her is to get a husband and have children.

As he leaves, he runs into an acquaintance from medical school, Dr. Frederick Lawford (Rex Harrison), who invites him to come with him while he visits Lady Raebank, a rich hypochondriac at the most expensive, snob nursing home in London.  It isn’t long before Andrew himself starts making a lot of money by also treating rich women who have nothing wrong with them.  Another doctor who is in on the scam, Dr. Charles Every (Cecil Parker), points out while he and other doctors are playing golf that whenever Lawford speaks in general terms about patients, he always uses the feminine gender.

In addition to all the money that can be made off rich women, doctors that treat them have plenty of leisure time, and nothing says that better than a game of golf.  Unlike Jeff in Where Danger Lives, who works fifteen hours a day, or Dr. Reed in Panic in the Streets, who gets one day off every six weeks, these doctors in The Citadel don’t have to put in the long and hard.

Christine does not approve of Andrew’s unethical behavior, billing patients for doing nothing, prescribing treatments that don’t cure ailments that don’t exist.  It doesn’t help when she reads in the society page about Andrew being entertained by Miss Toppy LeRoy on a night when he said he would be home late on account of business.  Christine eventually tells Andrew that his work isn’t supposed to be about making money, but about helping his fellow man.  He tells her he doesn’t want to discuss it.

When Andrew’s best friend is hit by a car and needs surgery, Dr. Every, who only knows how to cater to rich women, botches the operation, and the friend dies. Andrew has a revelation.  Christine was right.  He is not supposed to make lots of money.  He is supposed to serve mankind.

There is a famous quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations recognizing the social good of the free market, where people seeking after their own interests end up providing benefits for others:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Well, this may be true of butchers, brewers, and bakers, but not of doctors, if the movies are any indication.  Those movies do indeed address the humanity of doctors, expecting them to act from benevolence rather than from self-love, and working long, hard hours when they do so.  And that means they must leave those silly, rich women alone with their imaginary ailments.

Double Indemnity (1944)

There is nothing new about a woman and her lover killing her husband.  That’s been going on since Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon.  What inspired James M. Cain to write Double Indemnity was the additional feature of insurance, as in the case of Ruth Snyder, whose murder trial Cain covered as a journalist in 1927.  While having an affair with Judd Gray, she got her husband Albert to take out a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, one that promised to pay extra in case the insured died by accident or by some violent means.  This added a whole new dimension to an old story.

Let this be a warning to all husbands.  The whole point of life insurance is to provide for your loved ones, say your wife and children, in the event of your death.  The manner of your death has nothing to do with their dependency on you as a breadwinner.  Their needs will be the same whether you die in your sleep or fall off a cliff.  So, if your wife seems to be taking an undue interest in the double indemnity clause of the policy you are considering, this should occasion a moment of reflection.

My mother once told me that a man might be averse to taking out a life insurance policy for fear that after his death, his wife will squander all the money on some younger man.  But if the policy also has a double indemnity clause that the wife keeps asking the salesman about, she may already have that younger man, with special plans for him later.  Some believe Albert refused to take out that policy, for just that reason, but with the connivance of the insurance salesman, anxious to get his commission, Albert’s name on the policy was forged.

Killing Albert turned out to be something of a challenge, but after several attempts, Snyder and Gray managed it.  They were sloppy, however, leaving behind incriminating evidence.  Eventually, they turned on each other, as if that would help.  Both of them died in the electric chair.

Never mentioned in the story of Ruth Snyder is that, in all likelihood, there was a time when she and Albert loved each other very much.  They took their vows in all sincerity, fully believing every word of the ceremony, “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”  That last part turned out to have a significance neither of them could have imagined at the time.

One of the painful things about the movie Two for the Road (1967) is the way it keeps jumping back and forth between the four stages of love:  when the man and woman first meet, their courtship, their marriage, and the affairs they have after love has died.  The movie won’t let us forget how these two miserable people were once so much in love.  But in real life, we do forget.  And so it was, in all probability, that while Ruth and Judd were cuddling in bed, they convinced themselves that she never felt that way about Albert, and Judd never felt that way about his wife.  More importantly, it never occurred to them that the contempt, if not hatred, they presently had for the ones they married, they might someday have for each other.

Have there been stories in which men have murdered their wives for the insurance money?  Yes, of course.  But such stories just do not capture the imagination in the same way.  Perhaps it’s because men are more violent than women, more likely to commit murder, so we are not as shocked when a man murders his wife.  I regularly hear about men killing their wives or girlfriends and whoever else happens to be in the room on the nightly news.  And that’s the local news I’m talking about.  As for women, perhaps it’s because we tend to be sentimental about women, seeing them as being more caring, loving, and nurturing than men are, and so it is more shocking when a woman murders her husband.  Still, there have been movies made in which a man murders his wife for money, such as Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), but they just don’t horrify us as much as when it is the woman that murders her husband.

Just as there is nothing new about a woman murdering her husband, neither is there anything new about murder being committed for money.  But when it is money being paid out by an insurance company, money also becomes a motive for solving the crime.  Cain also made an insurance policy part of the plot in the The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was made into a movie in 1946.  Normally, if the beneficiary of a policy is charged with murdering the policyholder, the insurance company will delay paying the claim:  if the beneficiary is acquitted, the company will pay; if he is convicted, it will not.  In this movie, however, it is the other way around.  The prosecutor waits to see what the insurance company’s investigators come up with.  When these top-notch investigators fail to find incriminating evidence, the insurance company pays the claim.  That is when the prosecutor realizes he doesn’t have a case.  I don’t think that’s the way things work in real life, but the idea is that a police detective gets paid whether he solves a crime or not, but when an insurance company stands to lose a lot of money, they will try much harder to prove foul play.

As another example, an insurance investigator solves a crime in The Killers (1946) because his company had to pay off when the money stolen was never recovered.  In a similar way, money is also the motive in films noir in which a private detective solves a crime when the police failed to.  So, instead of the police solving the crime as part of their duty to enforce the law, films noir cynically reject this idealistic notion by making money the central motive of the investigation rather than justice.

In the case of Snyder and Gray, the police solved the crime all by themselves.  The insurance policy merely supplied the motive.  But in his novel, Cain wisely made Keyes, Claims Manager for General Fidelity of California, the principal detective on the case.  Keyes seems to have uncanny powers of intuition when it comes to spotting insurance fraud.  In the movie, he refers to it as the “little man” inside his chest, who gives him indigestion whenever a phony claim comes before him.  But it is an intuition distilled from years of having immersed himself in statistics and actuarial tables, along with dealing with insurance fraud directly.  In the movie, there is a scene in which Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is talking to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), the insurance salesman who conspired with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to murder her husband and make it look like an accident.  With disgust, Keyes says the inquest was over with in forty-five minutes.  “Verdict, accidental death.”  Neff asks what the police figure.  Keyes replies:  “That he got tangled up in his crutches and fell off the train. They’re satisfied. It’s not their dough.”

In the novel, Walter gets Phyllis to show up at the inquest with a minister.  “Once a coroner’s jury sees that it’s a question of burial in consecrated ground,” Walter informs the reader, “the guy could take poison, cut his throat, and jump off the end of a dock, and they would still give a verdict, ‘in a manner unknown to this jury.'”

There was another improvement made by Cain over the case of Ruth Snyder.  She had her husband take out a life insurance policy with an extra payout for accidental death.  Cain made the policy one of accident insurance by itself.  Happening to be in the neighborhood, Walter Huff (“Neff” in the movie) decides to stop by the house of one of his customers, Mr. Nirdlinger (“Dietrichson” in the movie), in hopes of getting him to renew his automobile insurance.  As it is the middle of the day, he has little hope of finding him at home, but decides it’s worth a try.

Once he gets past the maid, he finds himself talking to Mrs. Nirdlinger.  She tells him her husband is thinking about switching to the Automobile Club.  After a while, Huff begins to suspect she wants him to split the commission with her in exchange for getting her husband to renew with General Fidelity of California.  Huff informs the reader that there is a lot of that going on, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a reputable insurance agent like himself would participate in.  But while those thoughts are going through his head, he finds himself appreciating her figure beneath her blue pajamas.  He is wondering if his ethical standards would be able to resist splitting a commission with an attractive woman like Mrs. Nirdlinger.

“But all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair. ‘Do you handle accident insurance?’”

Huff informs the reader that accident insurance is sold, not bought, so her asking about it out of the blue is most unusual.  In addition to that, the payout is substantial, for which reason it lends itself to insurance fraud.  Finally, unlike life insurance, no physical examination is required, and the insured doesn’t even have to know anything about it.  All the insurance company wants is the money for the premium, and “there’s many a man walking around today that’s worth more to his loved ones dead than alive, only he don’t know it yet.”

Another improvement made by Cain over the Snyder case is that of having the wife’s lover be the insurance salesman, someone that knows what a claims adjuster will look for, and knows where people committing insurance fraud tend to slip up.  There is a scene in both the book and the movie in which Keyes is upset about a policy that Walter sold on a truck that later became the basis for a fraudulent claim.  Walter points out that he had attached a memo saying the man should be investigated first.  This lets us know that Walter is also alert to the possibility of fraud, which is why Keyes later tries to talk him into becoming his assistant.  And so, whereas Snyder and Gray committed a clumsy murder that even an ordinary flatfoot could see through, the novel becomes a game of wits between two men, each an expert in the insurance business, making it a story in which one of them sets out to commit the perfect crime that will escape the detection of the other.

Cain’s novel is in the form of a first-person narrative, in which Walter tells us how he became involved in a scheme to murder a man’s wife.  In this way, we are privy to his thoughts, such as his suspicion that Mrs. Nirdlinger wanted a cut of the commission, his forebodings about her interest in accident insurance, and his commentary on the sinister aspect of such insurance.  And, like most such novels, it is told in the past tense.  Movies, on the other hand, are usually in the present tense, and we merely watch events unfold.  Only through dialogue do we get any insight into what someone is thinking.  Therefore, in order to better represent such a novel as a movie, it should be told in flashback, which is what is done here.

The flashback, however, is not simply a way of making a movie unfold like a first-person narrative in a novel, for the flashback form also gives us some idea how things will end up.  And so it is that whereas in the novel, the story begins with Walter telling us why he happened to show up at the Nirdlinger house in the middle of the day, in which case we haven’t the slightest idea that anything bad is going to happen to him, the movie lets us know right off that something bad did happen, and Walter’s narration will explain what led up to it.  Just as Cain made improvements over the Snyder case in writing his novel, the movie makes improvements over the novel, and this flashback device is one of them.

During the credits, while we hear ominous music, we see the silhouette of a man moving toward us with the aid of two crutches.  We sense that he is dangerous, but this is contradicted by the crutches, for how could a man in his condition, we wonder, be dangerous?  As the credits end, we see a city street late at night.  A car going fast almost crashes into some men doing repairs underneath a sign that says, “Los Angeles Railway Maintenance,” foreshadowing the role that a train will have in this story.  The car swerves and continues to speed recklessly along the streets, though no one is in pursuit.  Finally, it pulls up in front of a building.  A man gets out with a coat draped over him.  It looks like the same man that was in silhouette.  The elevator operator lets us know that the man is Walter Neff.  He lets him out on the twelfth floor, which is the main office of Pacific All Risk Insurance Company.

When he gets to his office and removes his overcoat, we see that he has been shot, a small spot of blood near his left shoulder, incapacitating his left arm, much in the way that the man in silhouette had an incapacitated left foot.  He removes his fedora, and with a little difficulty, uses his thumbnail to ignite a match so he can light up a cigarette.  Once he takes a drag and exhales, he is ready.  He puts a new cylinder in the Dictaphone, addressing an office memorandum to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager.  He remarks that what he is about to say may sound like a confession, but he doesn’t like that word.  He says he just wants to set him straight on the Dietrichson claim.

In other words, he’s not worried about his wound, and he’s not worried that he is about to incriminate himself in a couple of murders.  He tried to pull off the perfect crime, and almost did so, fooling even Keyes, the one man he most feared would see through his scheme.  It is important to him to let Keyes know how it all went down, where Keyes went wrong, and why.  He then begins where the novel did, with his decision to stop by the Dietrichson house, which he says must have cost somebody $30,000, if he ever finished paying for it.  (The year is 1938, so that would be well over $500,000, adjusted for inflation, in today’s dollars.)

Another improvement in the movie over the novel is due to the fact that Billy Wilder, the director, got Raymond Chandler, author of novels like Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep, to help with the screenplay.  And so, whereas there is something a little hurried and abrupt about Cain’s style of writing, Chandler, who said he never cared for Cain’s novels, was able to smooth out the story and give it some style.  For example, when Walter Neff arrives at the Dietrichson house for the first time, he notes the smell of honeysuckle in the air, leading him to ask, “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

What I like about that line is the way it introduces another element in the crime beyond motive.  Early in his confession on the Dictaphone, Neff admits to committing murder, saying he killed Mr. Dietrichson for money and for a woman.  But it’s not merely that sex was a motive for the crime, along with the money.  Rather, it’s the effect sex had on his attitude about murder that is important.  Sex has a way of soothing our conscience, keeping us from having the feelings of guilt that we should.  Usually, this just makes it easier to violate some sexual taboo.  But it can also make it easier to do something evil that is not sexual in nature.  A man and woman in love can sometimes talk themselves into committing a crime they would never dream of doing otherwise.  The crime becomes an expression of their love for each other.  It’s so sweet that they would even kill for each other.  Hence the remark about honeysuckle.

In the beginning, Phyllis tries to get Walter to allow her to get accident insurance on her husband without his knowing about it.  She hates her husband, but has no definite plan to murder him.  She is just hoping that once she gets the policy, her husband will have an accident in the oil fields and die.  We later find out from her stepdaughter Lola that Phyllis may have contributed to her mother’s death while acting as her nurse during an illness.  According to Lola, while her mother had a fever, Lola walked into the bedroom and found that Phyllis had the windows wide open, letting in the cold winter air.  After the mother died, Phyllis then married Lola’s father.  This kind of opportunism is probably what Phyllis had in mind for her husband once she got him the accident policy:  wait for propitious circumstances, and then help them along a little.  Making Phyllis a nurse was another improvement on Cain’s part over the Snyder case.  It reinforces those sentimental feelings we have about women, alluded to above, about caring and nurturing, all the better to unnerve us when she turns out to be coldblooded.

Limiting Phyllis’s dark past to what she did with Lola’s mother in the movie is a major improvement over the novel, where it turns out the Phyllis is a serial killer from way back.  As a pulmonary nurse, before killing the first Mrs. Nirdlinger, she had already killed three children, making it appear they died of pneumonia.  She did this because she was related to one of them and, as executrix, was able to take possession of the property herself.  The other two children were killed just to keep the police from focusing on the one she made money off of.  Then it turns out there were five mysterious deaths before that, two of which Phyllis profited from.  And Lola will be next, so that Phyllis can get whatever she has as well.

But it gets worse.  In the novel, Phyllis says she doesn’t hate her husband.  As she agrees to go along with the plan to murder him, she says, “I haven’t any reason. He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman. I don’t love him, but he’s never done anything to me.”

Then comes a strange justification.  She says, “He’s not happy. He’ll be better off—dead.”  In a sense, she knows it’s not true, but she says it’s based on a strange notion she has:

“I know it’s not true. I tell myself it’s not true. But there’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness… Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself it’s terrible. But to me, it doesn’t seem terrible. It seems as though I’m doing something—that’s really best for him, if he only knew it. Do you understand me, Walter?”

Later in the movie, Lola says that before her father died, she saw Phyllis trying on a black hat, pinning on a veil, as if preparing for how she will look in mourning.  But Lola sees more than that in the novel.  She tells Walter she plans to go to the police and tell them what she knows:

“I’ll tell them everything they need to know. I told you there was plenty more, besides what I told you. I’ll tell them to ask her about the time I came in on her, in her bedroom, with some kind of foolish red silk thing on her, that looked like a shroud or something, with her face all smeared up with white powder and red lipstick, with a dagger in her hand, making faces at herself in front of a mirror….”

At the end of the novel, after Phyllis and Walter try to kill each other, Keyes doesn’t want the bad publicity of a trial, so he just puts them on a ship sailing south without either of them realizing the other one is on the ship too.  When they meet each other, Phyllis suggests that they could be married, but not with any illusions about their having a future.  But then she decides she has a different marriage in mind, saying the time has come “For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I’ll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I’ll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart.”  Walter says he’ll give her away, meaning he will join her.  There is a shark following the ship.  They agree to wait until the moon is up so that they can see the dark fin of the shark when they dive into the water to meet their death.  These are some of the last words Walter writes:

I’m writing this in the stateroom. It’s about half past nine. She’s in her stateroom getting ready. She’s made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks. She’s got that red thing on. It’s awful-looking. It’s just one big square of red silk that she wraps around her, but it’s got no armholes, and her hands look like stumps underneath it when she moves them around. She looks like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice for souls in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Instead of letting it be a story about a woman who has come to hate her husband and wants to kill him for the insurance money, as in the case of Ruth Snyder, Cain has turned the Phyllis of his novel into a fantastic monster.  The movie wisely returns to the idea that Phyllis is just your ordinary psychopath, one that you or I might inadvertently find ourselves married to, and not some utterly deranged serial killer.

At first, all Walter was hoping for was to have an affair with Phyllis.  But when he hears about her plan to get the accident policy on her husband without his knowing about it, Walter immediately realizes that she is dangerous, and he gets up and leaves, picking up his hat as he heads for the door.  There follows a scene that many people miss, while others catch it, but think it is a goof.  That night, as Walter broods over his situation with Phyllis, she shows up at his apartment.  When he opens the door, she says, “You left your hat today.”  A lot of people, including professional critics, think that Walter did leave his hat behind at her house.  Others, having noticed that Walter picked up his hat on the way out the door, conclude that this is a mistake.  However, it is obvious that Phyllis has no hat in her hand as she stands in the doorway.

What Phyllis is doing is amusing herself with the remark about the hat.  If a man has recently met a woman and would like to see her some more, he may pretend to leave something behind at her home.  We don’t wear hats so much any more, but an umbrella is a good substitute.  Then the man can call her up the next day and say, “Did I leave my umbrella over at your place yesterday?”  When she says that he did, he can then ask if it would be all right to drop by and pick it up.  With a little luck, one thing will lead to another.  Phyllis is alluding to that ruse by making believe she has his hat and is using it as an excuse to see him.  In so doing, she is essentially saying, “We both know why I’m here.”

At least, we figure she is there to have sex with Walter.  But during his confession on the Dictaphone, Walter says, “Yes, I killed him.  I killed him for money and for a woman.  And I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman.  Pretty, isn’t it?”  That remark, “I didn’t get the woman,” always puzzled me.  Didn’t he get the woman when she came over to his apartment, once before the murder, with the hat routine, and again after the murder, when Walter says Keyes will be watching her, and they will have to quit seeing each other for a while?  We’re all used to scenes fading out in old movies, where we are supposed to imagine the man and woman having sex, and there was a fade out at a critical moment in the second visit to his apartment.  Well, I finally figured that he meant that while they did have sex once or twice, he still didn’t get the whole woman.  But you never do.  That’s why they call it a piece.  In the novel, however, it is clear that they did not have sex on either night that she came over to his place or at any other time.  All they did was plan the murder.  I should think a man would want to have sex with a woman before agreeing to kill her husband, but I’m just an armchair philosopher, so what do I know?

On the night she and Walter trick her husband into signing the application for the accident insurance, Walter hears him say he is taking a trip to Palo Alto.  Walter tells Phyllis to get him to take the train.  He knows that getting killed while riding a train is so rare that the $50,000 policy will pay off at twice that amount owing to a double indemnity clause in the policy, which would be over $1,800,000 adjusted for inflation.  In the novel, Walter plans on murdering her husband on a train right from the start, without the slightest idea of how to get him on a train.  The movie is better in having the possibility of an accident on a train just fall into their laps.

In the novel, Phyllis tells Walter that her husband wants her to go with him to Palo Alto, saying, “He’ll raise an awful fuss if I don’t go.”  Walter dismisses that problem:

“Yeah? Listen, don’t give yourself airs. I don’t care if it’s a class reunion or just down to the drugstore, a man would rather go alone than with a wife. He’s just being polite. You talk like you’re not interested in his class reunion, and he’ll be persuaded. He’ll be persuaded so easy you’ll be surprised.”

“Well, I like that,” she says.   (The woman who’s planning on killing her husband is indignant that he doesn’t want her company.)

“You’re not supposed to like it,” Walter replies. “But you’ll find out.”

By chance, Mr. Dietrichson breaks his leg.  That too turns out to be to their advantage.  On the night of the murder, Walter hides in the backseat of the car that Phyllis will use to drive her husband to the train station.  In the novel, Walter says, “Believe me it’s an awful thing to kibitz on a man and his wife, and hear what they really talk about.”  Just another one of Cain’s disparaging remarks about marriage, based on his personal experience, no doubt.

They kill her husband before he gets on the train.  In the novel, Walter says, “I took one of the crutches and hooked it under his chin. I won’t tell you what I did then.”  I guess Cain felt it would be indelicate to go into details about the way he used the crutch to break the man’s neck.

Then Walter pretends to be the husband and boards the train, jumping off soon after, before the train can pick up much speed, after which they dump the husband’s body on the tracks.  Because Neff put his own leg in a phony cast and got on the train with the crutches, people were confident they had seen Dietrichson get on the train.  As Keyes says later, the witnesses had the crutches to look at, so they never really saw the man at all.

In the novel, after Walter gets back to his bungalow, the enormity of what he has done begins to overwhelm him:

I dived for the bathroom. I was sicker than I had ever been in my life. After that passed I fell into bed. It was a long time before I could turn out the light. I lay there staring into the dark. Every now and then I would have a chill or something and start to tremble. Then that passed and I lay there, like a dope. Then I started to think. I tried not to, but it would creep up on me. I knew then what I had done. I had killed a man. I had killed a man to get a woman. I had put myself in her power, so there was one person in the world that could point a finger at me, and I would have to die. I had done all that for her, and I never wanted to see her again as long as I lived.

That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.

Eventually, Walter tells Phyllis that they will have to quit seeing each other for a while, until Keyes is through investigating.  In the novel, he says, “That night I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed.”  Perhaps the prayer went something like this:  “Dear God, please don’t let Keyes find out that I killed Phyllis’s husband.”

All right, back to the movie.  Suspecting that Mr. Dietrichson was murdered, Keyes realizes it would be easier to murder him before he got on the train, which is what happened, rather than kill him on the train.  That means that Phyllis must have had a male accomplice pretend to be her husband.  Keyes starts having her house watched.  As a result, Walter and Phyllis have to stop seeing each other until the investigation is over.  Phyllis’s stepdaughter, Lola, had a boyfriend, Nino Zachetti, but they broke up, and soon he and Phyllis start having an affair. Keyes concludes that Nino is the accomplice in the murder and calls off the surveillance.  He tells Walter he is going to reject the claim, daring her to take it to court.

What follows from this point on seems to make no sense.  Walter goes over to Phyllis’s house intending to kill her, and she slips a pistol under the cushion so that she can murder him. Let us consider the situation from Phyllis’s point of view. Unless we assume she is psychic, she does not know of Walter’s plans to kill her. So, what does she hope to gain by killing Walter? The police have already dropped the case, but if Walter is murdered, the police will not only investigate his death, but it might make them reconsider her husband’s death as well, since Walter supposedly sold him the policy. Furthermore, shooting Walter in her house will not only get blood all over the place, but she will then have to dispose of the body. What is she going to do, cut him up in the bathtub like the guy in Rear Window (1954), and then make several trips to the city dump with the body parts in a suitcase?

The prudent thing for her to do is to just sue the insurance company.  If she wins, she can give Walter his cut and all will be well. If she does suspect Walter wants to kill her, then she should simply refuse to let him come over to her house. After all, he is not going to gun her down on Main Street. Therefore, it makes no sense for her to shoot Walter.

Now let us look at it from Walter’s point of view.  By this point, Walter has obviously given up on getting his share of the money, because she cannot very well collect and split with him after he kills her.  So, what does he hope to gain by killing Phyllis? All Keyes knows is that Phyllis has been seeing Nino, which means she has been having an affair with a younger man. Big deal. Keyes says he has investigated Nino’s movements on the night of the murder, and they cannot be accounted for.  We later find out from Lola that he broke a date with her the night of the murder, claiming he was home sick.  But that is not exactly evidence that will convict a man of murder.  In any event, we know that Nino did not do it, so he is not going to get tripped up in a cross examination in court, as Keyes seems to think.  With nothing more to go on, Keyes has little chance of successfully denying Phyllis’s claim in court, and it certainly would not be enough for the police to reopen the case. Walter should just continue to stay away from Phyllis.  Whether she wins her case, and if she does, whether she splits the money with him, there is no point in killing her.  And there is always the chance that she might win and pay him off anyway.

But let us assume that beyond all reason, Walter is afraid that enough would come out in the civil suit that would lead the police to reopen the investigation into the death of Phyllis’s husband, and make them suspect not Nino, but Walter.  In that case, Walter should simply turn in his resignation at the insurance company and go to Mexico for a while. If Phyllis’s lawsuit does not lead to a new police investigation in which he becomes a suspect, he can always return to the United States later; if it does lead to a new investigation, and he does become a suspect, he can continue to hide out in Mexico. But his killing her will definitely cause the police to investigate. Walter’s plan is that Nino will be blamed for Phyllis’s murder. But Nino might have an alibi for that night. As it turns out, Nino was coming to see Phyllis just as Walter was leaving the house, but Walter could not know Nino was going to do that. Walter tells Phyllis, just before he kills her, that he knows Nino will be coming to see her in fifteen minutes with the cops right behind him, because it has been all set up. Now, how would he know that? And set up for what?  If they plan on arresting him, they should just go to his apartment.  Furthermore, Nino would have no motive for murdering her. If anything, the police might end up suspecting Walter. Therefore, it makes no sense for Walter to kill Phyllis.

Since Nino was coming over to see Phyllis, that means that if she had successfully killed Walter, Nino would have walked in the house and seen Walter’s corpse lying on the middle of the living room floor.  And then what?  Will Phyllis ask him to help her dispose of the body of the man that helped her kill her husband?  How likely is he to go along with that?  He was fine having sex with Phyllis, but I doubt that he would want to get mixed up in a couple of murders.

However, it is reasonable to assume that two people who have committed a murder and are afraid of getting caught might not be thinking clearly.  In fact, if they had been thinking clearly, they would never have committed that murder in the first place.  It is especially hard to believe that a man could have an affair with a married woman, conspire to kill her husband, and not have it occur to him that one of these days she may turn on him too.  And so, I suppose that if people are foolish enough to commit such a murder, they would be foolish enough to think that killing their partner in crime would solve their problems.  So, their behavior makes sense on an emotional level.

You really have to give those hormones credit!