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Last year marked the seventieth anniversary of the release of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), a Hollywood classic that is often cited as the definitive example of film noir. Adapted from James M Cain's 1943 novel of the same name, and with a screenplay by Wilder and hardboiled-crime novelist Raymond Chandler, the film explores notions of fatalism, greed, betrayal, guilt and masculine anxiety, revealed in the film through flashbacks that act as a cynical commentary on the inevitability of fate.
The narrative follows insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) as he recounts meeting married seductress Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck); their mutual lustful greed leads them to murder for insurance money and, through a convoluted spiral, culminates in emptiness and death. Unlike fellow auteur Edmund Goulding's tasteful observations of greed in Nightmare Alley (1947), here Wilder pursues a cynical, corrosive criticism of American materialism and consumerist society. The opening scenes of the film show Neff returning to his empty Los Angeles office building late one night. Clearly in physical pain, he confesses his transgressions to his colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson) via a Dictaphone. This foreboding opening emphasises the sense of doom that will permeate the rest of the film.
Defined by themes of cynicism and disillusionment, complemented by expressionistic visual and musical compositions, and usually displaying characters involved in immoral activities, films that would subsequently be identified as noir began to appear in Britain and Hollywood in the late 1930s, but became more common in the 1940s. Invariably, most critics claim the movement began with The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and ended with Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958). The aesthetics of film noir are generally attributed to the impact of German film company UFA (Universum Film AG) and German expressionist cinema. Lee Horsley notes that film noir has been related to European representations of criminal psychology, working-class crime, and the 'noir dynamics' of Alfred Hitchcock's British films.1 Film noir is also closely associated with the cultural shifts in the United States during World War II, capturing masculine anxieties regarding women working in traditional male roles as well as assuming new social status and, in some industries, authority. Bernard F Dick notes that, thematically, film noir's most distinctive feature is the acceptance,...