A Film Canon

Double Indemnity stands in the same relation to James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler as The Maltese Falcon does to Dashiell Hammett, translating their particular hard-boiled visions into a series of motifs and preoccupations that will become prototypical for classical noir. In some cases, these visions intersect, as in the elaboration of a bourgeois family schism - and, more specifically, a sickly proximity between motherhood and sisterhood - that speaks to a scepticism both of bourgeois values, and of everything outside those values; that is, to a deep bourgeois self-loathing, as if the protagonists' true province were the fine line between classes. Nevertheless, Cain's taste for sophisticated villains sits uneasily with Chandler's proportionate simplification of women, with the result that only one half of the crime duo - a bored housewife (Phyllis Dietrichson) who convinces an insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) to assist in the murder of her husband - is elaborated at any length, albeit to an extent that sets the stage for the proliferation of criminal protagonists and narrations to come. Concomitantly, Chandler and Wilder completely transform the relationship between the salesman and his boss (Edward G. Robinson), re-imagining it as a homosocial respite from women whose transgressive undertones nevertheless seem to relate more to the conception of an exclusively cerebral romance than to the suggestion of some alternate sexual persuasion -  a scenario that sits nicely with Robinson's peculiarly asexual screen presence. Similarly, Chandler integrates Cain's pulp locales into an - admittedly nascent - panoramic mobility more in keeping with his own lurid romanticism, if only by virtue of the particular attention he draws to the duo's recognition that the only way to avoid capture is to sink back into all those spaces where anonymity might dwell, most poetically in several scenes shot in and around "Jerry's Market", in downtown Los Angeles.