A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of April
A Lavish Display
April 24, 1944 was the release date of the thriller movie “Double Indemnity”.
The movie “Double Indemnity” is a 1944 film noir, co-written by Billy Wilder and detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler. The screenplay was based on the novella of the same name by James M. Cain which was originally presented as an eight-part serial. The term ‘double indemnity’ refers to a clause in certain life insurance policies that doubles the payout in rare cases when death is caused accidentally, such as while riding a railway.
The film starred Fred MacMurray as the insurance salesman, Edward G Robinson as the insurance claims adjuster who job is to find phony claims, and Barbara Stanwyck as a housewife who wishes her husband were dead. Fred MacMurray is infatuated with Barbara Stanwyck and devises a plan to make the murder of her husband appear to be an accidental fall from a train, thus triggering the double indemnity clause in the husband’s insurance policy.
The story began making the rounds in Hollywood shortly after it was published as a serial in 1936. Its author James Cain had already made a name for himself the year before with the “Postman Always Rings Twice”, a story of murder and passion between a migrant worker and the unhappy wife of a café owner. Cain’s agent sent copies of the novella to all the major studios and within days, all were competing to buy the rights for $25,000. Then a letter went out from Joseph Breen at the Hays Office, the enforcers of the 1930 Production Code, saying the story was unacceptable. All the studios withdrew their bids.
Eight years later, Paramount resubmitted the script to the Hays Office, but the response was nearly identical to the one eight years earlier. The studio then submitted a film treatment crafted by Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett, and this time the Hays Office approved the project with only a few objections: the portrayal of the disposal of the body, a proposed gas-chamber execution scene, and the skimpiness of the towel worn by the female lead in her first scene.
Praised by many critics when first released, “Double Indemnity” was nominated for seven Academy Awards but did not win any. Widely regarded as a classic, it is often cited as a model for the film noir style and as having set the standard for the films that followed in that genre. Wilder himself considered “Double Indemnity” his best film in terms of having the fewest scripting and shooting mistakes and always maintained that the two things he was proudest of in his career were the compliments he received from James Cain about “Double Indemnity” and from Agatha Christie for his handling of her “Witness for the Prosecution”.