Indemnity

Nearly everyone who is likely to view this page knows and loves the movie, and would most likely prefer watching it to reading it. This leaves devoted fans of Wilder and Chandler to consider it, as well as perhaps students of the form.

The screenplay itself is an unquestioned masterpiece, and has not even the movie's very very few faults (poor acting by secondary characters, etc.). So I will limit my comments to my assertion that this edition GREATLY underestimates the contributions of Chandler, going so far as to paint him as a pasty fussbudget ignorant of the craft of writing. Not true, bud, not by a long shot.

Wilder and Chandler got along like cats and dogs. That's no secret. Yet while Chandler had his faults, Wilder seemed to live to antagonize him, and quite uncharitably described him in some comments reprinted here. Saying how the married Chandler envied Wilder for "having all the pretty girls at Paramount" is one example of how cheap and childish the director's opinion of his co-writer was, as stated in this edition, quoting Wilder's bio. Either Wilder or Meyers had some crude bias against Chandler, if the introduction of this tome is to be believed at all. Because it's not even an accurate presentation of what Wilder really felt, as quoted in Chandler's own hit-and-miss bio written by Tom Hiney.

Anyway, much of the *structure* of the screenplay- the flashbacks, the additional scenes, the ebb and flow- is Wilder's tremendous savvy. But the things film historians seem to treasure above all else in this movie are the rapid-fire, crudely poetic, vernacular dialogue, as well as the feeling of cynical decay wrapped around the doomed couple's whole misbegotten endeavor like a shroud. And for those, I propose, Chandler must be given the majority of the credit. His novels are too sad and complex and perfect, providing ample evidence that he could not have been the doofus this book portrays.

There's my speech. Take it for what it's worth. The book is a good buy for serious students. But Chandler fans will be ticked off.

For those who already purchased the Library of America edition of "Raymond Chandler : Later Novels and Other Writings" (which contains the screenplay of "Double Indemnity"), here are two reasons why you should buy THIS edition of the "Double Indemnity" screenplay:

1. Unlike most other screenplays published in book form, this edition of "Double Indemnity" appears to be a facsimile of the original screenplay; It's not just a book, but a relic of classic film.

2. This edition also has the alternate/deleted "Gas Chamber" ending which the Library of America edition is lacking.

If it were not for the above two qualities, I would recommend any Chandler fan to purchase the Library of America edition of Chandler's work that contains the "Double Indemnity" screenplay instead of this one. Here's why:

In this edition, Chandler's name does NOT appear on the cover; only Bill Wilder is credited on the cover. However, Chandler's name DOES appear on the title page and first page of the screenplay (the Amazon scans of the book illustrate this curiosity). Why the exclusion of Chandler from the cover?!
Answer: This book was published while Billy Wilder was still alive and he was able to steal the limelight from Raymond Chandler one last time. Well done, Mr. Wilder.

As for the screenplay itself, I've read a lot of screenplays of movies that I have liked and "Double Indemnity" reads better than most. The voice-over dialogue for Neff (written by Chandler) is the best part of the screenplay and is worth having in print. Whether you're a fan of classic Film Noir or an aspiring screenwriter, this is a must-have for your bookshelf. As for Chandler fans, it's only a matter of which edition.

For more information on Raymond Chandler's involvement in "Double Indemnity", I recommend the book "Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir". After reading, you will see why I and other readers are so incensed by the exclusion of Chandler's credit from the cover.

Double Indemnity is one of Billy Wilders best films. The screenplay is taut and extremely well written. You cannot miss this opportunity to read the master at the top of his game. Among the many highlights is the supermarket scene between the two conspirators. An absolute must read

This volume is bursting at the seams with Chandler's writings and it is an astonishing value even at the retail price. It even comes wrapped in plastic!!! Alas I do have one complaint, you can buy Double Indemnity on it's own in a seperate volume that is very much in print. The editors at LOA must be aware of this. If so, they must also be aware that "The Blue Dahlia" is no longer in print and has not been since 1976. Wouldn't it have made more since to eliminate "Double Indemnity" since it is readily available in another volume and replace it with "Blue Dahlia"? Couldn't an argument be made that in addition to it's scarcity "The Blue Dahlia" is also a better representation of Chandler's screenwriting talent because it his only produced solo effort and the fact that it garnered him an Oscar nomination?

Bottom line: LOA has redeemed itself for it's blatant lies on the Dust Jacket of "Stories and Early Novels" (see my review "Incomplete and Misleading")By the way, no one has ever explained why they neglected to include Chandler's last complete Marlowe story, "The Pencil".
I will be writing other reviews of Chandler collections undwe the clever title of "The Simple Art of Editing" and let me assure you that they do not hold up as well as this LOA masterpiece.

Contained in this volume are the last four (of seven) Marlowe novels, the Double Indemnity script co-written with Billy Wilder (including lines that were cut), his famous essay on "The Simple Art of Murder", one on "Writers in Hollywood", another titled "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story", and finally "Notes (very brief, please) on English and American Style". Couple these with thoroughly entertaining and sometimes revealing letters to friends and fans, and you can't miss.

In one of these letters he even discusses fellow hardboiled writer Ross Macdonald's (here called John, as he hadn't changed his name yet) The Moving Target, which cribbed some ideas from The Big Sleep and Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man.

The novels themselves? Classic Chandler - enough said. If you'd like to know why you should expect the best in hardboiled detective fiction, well, read 'em all, or at least one. (If you're planning on that course of action, try the first in the series, The Big Sleep, included in a similar volume called Stories and Early Novels: Pulp Stories/The Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/The High Window.)

Bottom line, this is required reading for anyone who won't read just anything but at the same time doesn't limit themself to Anna Karenina.

A great series, that actually starts off strong. Some of her next novels fall short, some are better. Unless you fall head over heels for Paretsky, I would read other reviews to see which ones are better, and skip the 'read-in-order' process.
I read this around the time that that awful movie with Kathleen Turner came out, but through so-so books and a bad movie, I'm still a fan. That has to say something about Mrs. Paretsky.

I am a late-comer to the V.I. Warshawski series. I'd known about for years, but after seeing the dreadful Kathleen Turner movie version, I decided to skip the books. Stupid me! I've only read this first book, but I have to say I'm hooked. The character of V.I. Warshawski is probably one of the best female P.I. characters out there. Sara Paretsky has written strong, three dimensional female that you can easily become attached to. The plot of this first book was a little choppy, but the author's understanding of Chicago -- the lay of the land, the police, the politics -- makes up for any shortcomings. Bravo job! I look forward to reading the entire series.

After reading JM Redmann's wonderful Death by the Riverside featuring MIckey Knight, I was so vividly taken with the strong female character that I just had to re-read the other strong female character that I love: VI Warshawsky. Like Knight, Warshawsky is a tough cookie who can hurt, a smart woman who makes human mistakes, and a real pain... for friends who wish she wouldn't get herself into such danger.

Paretsky's gift in storytelling is the way she takes a small incident and lets it mushroom until seemingly unrelated incidents form the picture of a larger, uglier tale. Warshawsky herself is complicated and richly textured character and I loved revisiting her.

Overall, Schickel's short monograph on Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a nice piece of work. The information on Wilder's collaboration with the somewhat difficult Raymond Chandler is particularly well researched and well presented. Wilder is, after all, a writer's director, the way that John Ford is a director's director or Sergei Eisenstein, an editor's director. When film critic Andrew Sarris downgraded Wilder in his book THE AMERICAN CINEMA, it is because he could not understand that a director can be an artist while lacking a distinctive visual style. If Wilder's art comes out primarily during the scripting phase of the process, the resulting film can be just as successful -- especially if you have a great veteran like John B. Seitz behind the camera.

And there is no doubt that DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a masterpiece. It is a complex work bringing together Billy Wilder's bemused street smarts, James M. Cain's corrosive venom, and Raymond Chandler's poetic noir dialogue.

My only complaint with this monograph is that Schickel spent very little time on Cain's original novel except to pan it in passing. Granted that Chandler and Wilder improved on the original, the original is still one of the classic noir novels and deserves more than a passing nod.

Secondly, Schickel just mentions in passing an article on screenwriting written by Chandler and doesn't even bother footnoting it. I finally tracked down the article in the second volume of the outstanding Library of America set of Chandler's work (which, by the by, also includes the complete film script for DOUBLE INDEMNITY). Chandler was obviously very down on screenwriting. Like many writers, he assumed that the script was THE key element of the film, and that writers should be treated with greater deference. After reading it, I still think the world of Chandler, but I feel all the more respect for Wilder for how he handled his somewhat cranky associate.

Schickel is a first class film critic and has given an excellent introduction to the Wilder classic Double Indemnity. In may opinion it is the best so far of the BFI series.

Double Indemnity is perhaps the best film noir of all; and this is perhaps the best volume in the entire BFI series of monographs on classic (and modern classic) films. Schickel's study includes the usual (for the series) personal appreciation of the film and the way it helped create the genre (Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane set the tone and the look; Double Indemnity contributed the central iconic character of noir, the two-timing blonde, and it wasn't until she was added to the mix that the genre took off). But it's also a solid job of research, detailing the work process of Wilder and his often-frustrated collaborator Raymond Chandler, the way in which they turned Cain's prose into speakable dialogue (in the process improving almost every aspect of the original), and most intriguing of all, outlining the film's original ending, in which death in the electric chair paid off the theme of mechanized people in a mechanized society riding an assembly line to doom.

James Cain is not a mystery writer. There are no mysteries in his books, we know who did everything almost from the beginning. However, as a thriller writer he is unsurpassed. The action in his stories moves at breakneck pace, which is one reason, incidentally, why they are so short. I can't think of any other writer who exploited story length to the level that he did.

Cain's characters live in a world where a maleficent fate sooner or later overtakes them. There are no heroes; there are only ugly people. The protagonists in his stories are all ugly; the really unsettling thing is that you can usually find something of yourself in them. Walter Huff (he's renamed Walter Neff in the movie, for some reason) is an insurance agent who teams up with a woman to knock off her husband and collect on his accident policy. He's not a sympathetic character. We watch Huff go into a long slide, and become a pawn in the hands of people that he doesn't even know before the end - maleficent fate.

The movie, while very good, does not tell quite the same story as the book. Although Cain wrote the novel, the screenplay was written by Raymond Chandler, with an additional credit to Billy Wilder, who directed the movie. Chandler managed to turn Walter into a sort of Philip Marlowe gone wrong, right down to the snappy internal dialogue that was Chandler's trademark. Chandler also added an element of morality into the tale that it didn't have in the book. And why does Walter kill Phyllis in the movie? I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that this doesn't happen in the book.

If you're hooked on hardboiled fiction you should read this book. And although a lot of years have passed, maybe you'll appreciate why Cain was considered such a racy writer in his day, too.

In many ways, DOUBLE INDEMNITY is POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE redux -- the main exception being that POSTMAN's greasy spoon is replaced by a cozy upper middle class Spanish suburban house. In both books, a man is inspired by a sexy, discontented married woman into murdering hubby for gain.

POSTMAN's drifter is now a cocky insurance salesman (Walter Huff) who thinks he can both beat the odds and get the girl (Phyllis Nirdlinger), and -- why not? -- her daughter Lola as well. If you know anything about Greek tragedy, you can bet that the hubris mechanism is ready to spring into action with jaws agape.

James M Cain writes a tight novella that can easily be consumed in a single sitting. It's just that you feel you've been watching cockroaches mate from a great height. Few of Cain's novels show the least sign of sentiment, let alone liking, towards their characters. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder's script for the film is actually far superior because the character of Keyes is developed into a moral center around which the story unrolls. (It also helps that Cain's INDEMNITY has a really gonzo ending.)

Nonetheless, Cain is what he is -- and his stories are always worth reading. But do see the Billy Wilder movie version!

'Double Indemnity' by James Cain is about a big time insurance fraud involving murder. The story takes place in 1920s Los Angeles with the criminals being an insurance agent and a beautiful, wealthy wife. Sounds trite? In a sense it is, but the actual crime is very clever. And James Cain milks the suspense wonderfully. Unfortunately the books is very short, with the author skipping out on the details (background) of the main characters and their motivation for the dirty deed. At times the book felt like a Reader's Digest version of a full novel.

Yet 'Double Indemnity' is a fine read. Not on par with the author's best ('Mildred Pierce', 'The Postman Always Rings Twice') but still among the better in the genre.