James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Historians have long known that Billy Wilder originally filmed a different ending to Double Indemnity. In the first version, insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) was put to death in a California gas chamber. Wilder once told an interviewer that Neff's death was among "two of the best scenes I've ever shot in my whole life" (the other being the original opening to Sunset Boulevard ); it was, however, a controversial way to end the film, and he eventually dropped it because he felt that an execution was "unnecessary."

Perhaps Wilder was correct to make this choice. Few would deny that Double Indemnity is a definitive film noir and one of the most influential movies in Hollywood history. Then again, Wilder may have cut something important because of pressure from both the studio and the Breen

Office, which insisted that the gas chamber sequence was "unduly gruesome." 53Unfortunately, critics have never really debated the issue; they usually take the director's statements at face value, arguing that a protracted depiction of death by gas would have been unnecessary and inappropriately grim.

In what follows, I propose a contrary view, based in part on the closing pages of Wilder's and Raymond Chandler's script, and in part on the internal evidence of the film itself. Walter Neff's death in the gas chamber (which was not suggested by the James M. Cain novella) is a logical outgrowth of several important motifs in Double Indemnity, and it reveals the full implication of those motifs. Without it, claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) seems a less morally complex character, audiences are left feeling a bit more comfortable, and the film's critique of American modernity becomes less apparent. (The only Hollywood feature of the period that treated the theme of industrial progress with greater despair and sophistication was Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, which also lost its original ending.)

Even in its released form, Double Indemnity was an unorthodox film, challenging nearly a decade of Production Code resistance to James M. Cain's fiction. Although it contains no explicit sex or violence, it defies the PCA in at least three ways, which were spelled out by the Breen Office in a March 15, 1943, report to Paramount: first, it depicts an attractive pair of murderers who "cheat the law and die at their own hands"; second, it deals "improperly" with the theme of adultery; and third, it is "replete with explicit details of the planning of [a] murder." The story of how the script eventually gained Joseph Breen's approval has been told by Leonard Leff and Jerrold Simmons in their useful history of Hollywood censorship, The Dame in the Kimono, and the equally interesting story of Wilder's tense but productive collaboration with novice screenwriter Chandler can be found in Frank MacShane's Life of Raymond Chandler . 54I see no reason to go over this familiar ground, but I do want to show how the original ending of the film grew out of the preoccupations of its various writers. For my purposes, the important point to remember is that Wilder, Chandler, and Cain shared an outsider's or modernist intellectual's ambivalence toward Los Angeles, where Cain's novel was set. Under Wilder's supervision, this ambivalence was intensified to the point where the city seemed less like the urban sprawl described by Cain, and more like a dangerously seductive Eldoradoa center of advanced capitalism, instrumental reason, and death. The truly controversial aspect of the original film was not so much

its depiction of sex and murder, but its grimly sardonic vision of a "Taylorized" or assembly-line America, culminating in the gas chamber sequence.

Of the three writers connected with the project, Cain was the least inclined to see California in dystopian termsthis despite the fact that he began his career as a journalist and university teacher on the East Coast and served briefly as an editor of The New Yorker. Like Dashiell Hammett, Cain was a veteran of World War I who wrote about violence and who published with Blanche and Alfred Knopf. 55The celebrated first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice was in fact a quintessential example of the hard-boiled manner: "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." But Cain avoided the pulps and did not write detective fiction; instead, he specialized in Dostoyevskian narratives of criminal psychology, transposed into lower-class America and strongly influenced by the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, the modernism of Ring Lardner, and the cultural criticism of H. L. Mencken. He was therefore discussed alongside such "serious" writers as John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and Nathanael West, whom Edmund Wilson dubbed "poets of the tabloid murder." 56Cain himself described his novels as a type of American tragedy, dealing with the ''force of circumstance" that drives an individual to the "commission of a dreadful act" (quoted in Hoopes, 551). Actually, he was closer to the spirit of melodramanot so much the melodrama of Hollywood, but of a certain kind of grand opera, in which the players are swept along on currents of violent desire. He often wrote about opera singers (in his youth he had wanted to become one), and he deliberately set out to "musicalize" emotions. His protagonists spoke in deadpan voices and lived in a world of pure kitsch, but they behaved like lovers in Carmen.

Although he was never especially good at writing film scripts, Cain enjoyed Hollywood.

In one of his most widely discussed essays, "Paradise" (1933), he attacked Southern California's automobile fetishism, bad food, and lack of organic culture; in the same breath, however, he declared that the state was populated by a more talented class of people than other parts of the country, and that "some sort of destiny awaits this place" (quoted in Hoopes, 226). He especially liked the sunny climate, and at one point he declared that all the great American novels had their roots in western populism. His approach to Double Indemnity seemed to confirm these mixed feelings, suggesting a symbiosis between modernity and literary modernism: he offered a darkly satiric account of the California insurance industry, but his style was simple, direct, speedyperfectly expressive of modern industrial values. Liberty, the slick-paper magazine where the novella was serialized, was famous for printing the exact reading times of its stories, and it declared that Cain would require "2 hours, 50 minutes, and 7 seconds," or not much longer than a night at the movies. (According to Maurice Zolotow's Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Wilder claimed to have read the story in fifty-eight minutes because he did not move his lips.)

Despite his relatively sanguine attitude toward California, Cain's fiction had nothing to do with successful pioneers or virtuous common folk. The working title of The Postman Always Rings Twice was Bar-B-Que, which gives a sense of the social world he was trying to delineate. Repeatedly, he focused on the marginal, rootless types who were descended from what H. L. Mencken described as the "morons who pour [into Los Angeles] from the prairies and deserts," giving to "the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of Aimee McPherson and the art of Cecil De Mille." Cain's strength as a writer lay in the fact that he treated these characters with Flaubertian detachment, making their destinies seem fatalistic, almost tragic. He also gave his doomed and relatively inarticulate narrators a keen awareness of their surroundings. Here, for example, is insurance salesman Walter Huff describing the Nirdlinger household in the first chapter of Double Indemnity:

All I saw was a living room like every other living room in California, maybe a little more expensive than some, but nothing that any department store might deliver on one truck, lay out in one morning, and have the credit O.K. ready the same afternoon. The furniture was Spanish, the kind that looks pretty and sits stiff. The rug was one of those 12*15's that would have been Mexican except that it was made in Oakland, California. . . . All these Spanish houses have red velvet drapes that run on iron spears, and generally some red velvet wall tapestries to go with them. This was right out of the same can, with a coat-of-arms tapestry over the fireplace and a castle tapestry over the sofa. 59