Double Indemnity (1944) on Netflix
Passed19441h 47mCrimeDramaFilm-NoirMysteryThriller
Insurance man Walter Neff calls at a client's house about an auto policy and meets the client's wife, Phyllis Dietrichson. She asks about a policy on her husband's life, without his knowledge.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.3/10183,315 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Walter Neff sells insurance for Pacific All Risk in Los Angeles. A routine renewal call takes him to the home of a client, Mr. Dietrichson, where he meets the client's wife, Phyllis. She wants a policy on her husband's life written without her husband's knowledge. Neff is an experienced salesman, and he reads her meaning. The two become lovers, and Neff designs the scheme: an accident policy slipped in with the renewal papers, a death made to look like a train accident, and the double indemnity clause that pays twice the amount. His colleague Barton Keyes, the claims manager, is a man proud of his eye for a fraudulent claim.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Harold Garrisonas Redcap (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Double Indemnity (1944)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James M. Cain based his Double Indemnity novella on the 1927 murder of Albert Snyder by his wife Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Judd Gray, who took out a $45,000 policy with a double-indemnity clause without Albert's knowledge.
- Hays Office censor Joseph Breen warned studios that the story's "general low tone and sordid flavor" made it "thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation before mixed audiences in the theater."
- Alan Ladd, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, and Fredric March all turned down the part of Neff. Wilder then approached George Raft.
- George Raft turned down the part of Walter Neff after interrupting Wilder's plot description to ask about "the lapel bit," assuming Neff was a detective; it was the last in a series of films Raft declined that became classics.
- Wilder reshot the scene of Phyllis and Walter dumping the corpse because his own car would not start as he left the location, and insisted MacMurray turn the ignition so slowly that the actor protested.
- Wilder brought Double Indemnity in under budget at $927,262, despite paying $100,000 each to MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Robinson, plus $44,000 for his writing and $26,000 for his directing.
- After Double Indemnity's success, Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation made Single Indemnity, marketed as Apology for Murder; Paramount won an injunction against its release that still remains in effect.
