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Film · 1944 · Film noir

Double Indemnity

Directed by Billy Wilder
1944
★ 9.0 editorial score

Film noir gets its blueprint here: Wilder and Chandler wrote dialogue nobody has matched for hardness, and set the pattern of the doomed man telling his own story.

“A hard-boiled thriller that helped define the meaning of film noir, bringing together a weak, brash insurance salesman and a bitchy Los Angeles housewife to plot the murder of her heavily insured husband, then play a cat-and-mouse game with an ace claims investigator. Greatly improving on Cain's novel, the film approaches perfection with its crackling dialogue, total absence of sentimentality, and depiction of Los Angeles as a new kind of anonymous, amoral, amorphous city.”
— Philip French · The Guardian

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