If you like your dialogue hardboiled, your lighting shadowy, and your femmes fatales preposterously evil, then look no further: Billy Wilder's 1944 adaptation of James M Cain's insurance-scam novella.
Comment
02/11/08
Double Indemnity (1944)
97 %
Reviews Counted: 39 Fresh: 38 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 8.7/10
Rated: PG
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Theatrical Release: 11-11-2005
Synopsis: Billy Wilder's classic noir, a familiar brew of lust, larceny, and lethal intentions, stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as a hot-blooded couple. Framed in flashback, the story is told by the dying Walter Neff (MacMurray), beginning with his first meeting with the seductive Phyllis... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Tom Powers
Director: Billy Wilder
Screenwriter: Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder
Producer: Joseph Sistrom
Composer: Miklos Rozsa, Cesar Franck
Screenwriter: Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder
Producer: Joseph Sistrom
Composer: Miklos Rozsa, Cesar Franck
Reviews
Top Critic Top Critic Top Critic
Film noir at its finest, a template of the genre, etc. Billy Wilder in full swing, Barbara Stanwyck's finest hour, and Fred MacMurray makes a great chump.
07/06/05
Top CriticClick to read the article
03/28/08
Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.
02/11/08
MacMurray has seldom given a better performance. It is somewhat different from his usually light roles, but is always plausible and played with considerable restraint.
08/14/07
Top Critic
Thanks to DVD, Phyllis will always be there waiting for you. Same chair, same perfume, same anklet, ready to make you wonder what she wonders.
10/08/06
The film is a brilliant collision of evil and the mundane, and one of the reasons viewers respond to it so well is that it makes the mundane seem a little sexier in the resulting debris.
09/23/06
Top Critic
Wilder's direction is crisp and the lighting and cinematography (by John F. Seitz) have become iconic touchstones.
09/01/06
An accepted classic and archetypal film noir, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is visually drab and flabby around the edges.
08/23/06
Three superlative perfromances, by Stanwyck, Fred MacMaurray, and Edward G. Robinson (the best of their careers), along with sharp, witty, macabre, and double-entendre dialogue, makes this quintessential noir one of the best Wilder and studio movies made.
08/21/06
Representante máximo do noir, conta com uma trama fascinante, atuações impecáveis, fotografia e direção irretocáveis e, é claro, diálogos inesquecíveis.
09/20/05
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