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The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags have been used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.
For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for Double Indemnity can be found here.
Yes. Double Indemnity is based on a novella of the same name by American crime novelist James M Cain [1892-1977]. The story first appeared as an 8-part serial in Liberty magazine in 1935. The novella was adapted for the movie by another American crime writer Raymond Thornton Chandler [1888-1959] along with director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]. A made-for-TV remake, Double Indemnity was released in 1973.
Yes. Novelist James A Cain based his novella on a 1927 crime in which a married Queens woman, (Ruth Brown Snyder), persuaded her lover to kill her husband Albert after Albert had just recently taken out a large insurance policy with a double indemnity clause.
Double indemnity is a clause in an insurance policy that provides for double the face amount of the policy should the policyholder die of an accidental death (a death that is not intentional, such as murder, nor foreseeable, such as cancer).
As the film scholar Bernard F. Dick writes: "[Billy] Wilder regarded [director] Ernst Lubitsch as the unrivaled master of subtlety. ... In Double Indemnity, the camera dollies back from Phyllis and Neff as they sit snugly on the sofa in his apartment. 'We just sat there,' Neff's voice is heard saying. We no more believe him than we believe the Lubitsch heroine who closes the door of her lover's bedroom and in the next shot awakens in her own." ("Anatomy of Film," 1978, pp. 142-143). Roger Ebert seems to agree with this interpretation, but adds "in 1944 movies you can't be sure [if the characters make love or not], but if they do, it's only the once."That this is a question at all is due to the Production Code era, which film scholar James Naremore says forced the directors to learn "the art of omission". Had the film been made today, the writer and director probably would have spelled it out for us. Naremore feels Double Indemnity indeed implies that Walter and Phyllis go to bed: "At one point she puts her head on his shoulder and cries softly, like the rain on the windows. The camera tracks backward and we dissolve to the insurance office [...] After a few moments, another dissolve returns us to the apartment: time has passed, and Walter and Phyllis are at either end of a sofa; he is reclining and smoking a cigarette while she reapplies her makeup." ("More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts," 1998, pp. 99).
In Double Indemnity (1944), Robinson's dinner sticks going halfway down. Why, he asks, would Mr. Dietrichson have failed to file for his accident insurance when he had just broken his leg? In The Stranger (1946), Robinson gets up in the middle of the night to wonder who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?
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