Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir, by Alain Silver & James Ursini

FILM
From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir
Alain Silver & James Ursini
Running Press, $55

It’s been 80 years since Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity was first released, and 81 since the James M. Cain novel on which the film is based was first published. Both are still readily available: Wilder’s acclaimed classic is streaming on Binge, Cain’s equally admired paperback is in any half decent library or perhaps the crime section of an astute bookstore. Fellow novelist Raymond Chandler is credited as the co-writer (with Wilder) of the film.

Alain Silver and James Ursini’s account of its production argues that, as well as being one of the “top shelf” films of the 1940s, it played a significant role in the history of film noir. That “movement”, as they refer to it, was an inclination that took hold of many crime thrillers of the time, spawned by various factors that include a visual style strongly influenced by German expressionism and Universal Studios’ horror films of the 1930s, specific character types (frequently an “ordinary Joe” portrayed by a femme fatale) and an overall mood of “psychological disintegration” generated by World War II.

Borrowing its main title from a marketing line for the film, From the Moment They Met It Was Murder is the latest of more than a dozen books on which Silver and Ursini have collaborated that directly or incidentally deal with film noir. They clearly love their material, they are very much across it (as their extensive and very readable footnotes attest) and they are well-equipped to write about it. And about Double Indemnityin which Fred MacMurray plays an “ordinary Joe” insurance investigator seduced by “a honey of an anklet” worn by Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale who wants to be rid of her drab husband.

The book, especially in the early chapters dealing with the real-life crime that inspired Double Indemnityis written with a sly smile and in a pulpy, hard-boiled idiom. This is a style of writing in which people imprisoned for their crimes have been “sent up the river”, cigarettes become “coffin nails”, capital punishment by way of electrocution is referred to as “frying”, and women’s legs (sorry, ladies ‘ legs) are known as “gams”.

Silver and Ursini identify the immediate source material for the film as what the tabloids of the time described as “the crime of the century”, noting that it’s predated by similar stories reaching back to ancient times. In 1920s New York, housewife Ruth Mae Snyder (nee Brown) and traveling salesman Henry Judd Gray were tried and fried for the murder of her husband. Among the attendees at their trial were Cain, Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, director DW Griffith, composer Irving Berlin and dramatist/journalist/suffragist Sophie Treadwell, whose play, Machinalbased on the case, opened on Broadway in 1928.

Superbly illustrated, the book grew out of an hour-long lecture the authors gave in 2018 illustrated by 150 PowerPoint slides. It’s not the first to take us up close to the film: other accounts include Richard Schickel’s 1992 monograph for the British Film Institute and an abundance of biographies about those involved in the production.

However, in addition to skilfully situating the film in the noir context and the extensive writing about it, Silver and Ursini provide their own short but thoughtful biographies of Cain, Chandler and Wilder, as well as a solid account of the film’s production history and the comments that have been written about it over the years.