Double Indemnity - 1944

Double Indemnity Framed Art Print
19 in. x 25 in.
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Double Indemnity (1944) is director Billy Wilder's classic film noir masterpiece - a cynical, witty, and sleazy thriller about adultery, corruption and murder. The urgently-told, highly-stylized story was Wilder's third film after The Major and the Minor (1942) and Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Wilder effectively used locales in the greater Los Angeles area: the Glendale train station, the Hollywood Bowl, 'Jerry's Market,' a night-time downtown office building, a Spanish-style house on Quebec St., the protagonist's apartment at the Chateau Marmont, etc.

The material for Double Indemnity was derived from 'hard-boiled' James M. Cain's 1943 melodramatic novella Three of a Kind that first appeared in 1935 in abridged, 8-part serial form in Liberty Magazine. It was adapted for the screen by director Billy Wilder and detective novelist Raymond Chandler (who was best known for his character Philip Marlowe, played by Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944), Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), and Robert Montgomery in Lady in the Lake (1946), among others).

[Cain's first infamous novel was a 1934 best-seller that was also staged in 1936 and made into a film in both 1946 and 1981 - Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1942, It.) was an unauthorized version of Cain's work - the first of the three. Another of Cain's 1941 novels was also made into a popular film noir with Joan Crawford - Mildred Pierce (1945).]