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Six years before a Hollywood screenwriter’s
corpse narrated ‘Sunset Blvd’, a dead-man-walking delivered the hard-boiled
voiceover in another Billy Wilder inquiry into moral rot in sunny California.
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a salesman for Pacific All-Risk Insurance,
staggers into the office late one night to record a memorandum regarding the
recent death of a policyholder: ‘I killed Dietrichson… for money, and a woman.
I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman.’
There’s nothing but a towel and a staircase
between Neff and the woman when they first meet; Neff pays a house call on
Dietrichson’s Spanish-revival pile in LA, where old dust levitates in the bands
of light through the Venetian blinds, and he encounters the oil executive’s
bored, platinum-blonde second wife, Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck). She’d like to
know if she can secretly procure a life insurance policy for her spouse; Neff
knows she’s conscripting him for her husband-disposal unit, and he knows that
claims manager Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson) will smell a putrefying rat,
but they’ve got power-surge chemistry, and that’s a honey of an anklet she’s
wearing…
As poised and
languorous as a cat, Stanwyck’s definitive femme fatale could be one of the
savvy minxes of the actress’ delectable Pre-Code years – the jailhouse alpha
female in ‘Ladies They Talk About’, the secretary trampolining up the office
ranks one bed at a time in ‘Baby Face’ – grown older and harder, her manicured
ruthlessness calcifying into brutal amorality. With diamond-hard repartee by
Wilder and Raymond Chandler (by way of James M Cain’s novel) and ghoulish
cinematography by the great John Seitz, this is the gold standard of ’40s noir,
straight down the line.