Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—a platinum blonde who wears tight white sweaters, an anklet, and sleazy-kinky shoes—is perhaps the best acted and the most fixating of all the slutty, cold-blooded femmes fatales of the film-noir genre. With her bold stare, her sneering, over-lipsticked, thick-looking mouth, and her strategically displayed legs, she’s a living entrapment device. Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, an insurance salesman, is the patsy she ensnares in a plot to kill her businessman-husband and collect on the double-indemnity clause in his policy; MacMurray’s slightly opaque, regular-guy, macho Americanness is perfectly used here (he has never had better audience empathy). And as Keyes, the claims investigator for the insurance company, Edward G. Robinson handles his sympathetic role with an easy mastery that gives the film some realistic underpinnings. It needs them, because despite the fine use of realistic sets—a cheerless middle-class home, a supermarket, offices—Chandler’s dialogue is in his heightened laconic mode, and the narration (Walter Neff tells the story) is often so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of 40s hard-boiled attitudes. This defect may be integral to the film’s taut structure. Another, lesser defect isn’t: except for the three stars, the cast is just barely adequate.

I love Double Indemnity because it's about a couple who are cheap and greedy, but achieve a kind of tragic heroism; because it has one of the great father-son relationships (although they aren't actually father and son); because it's a thoroughly cynical thriller redeemed by just a fading touch of romance. And it also has a trio of superb performances: Fred MacMurray, who tended to play amiable chumps, was here recast as a devious murderer (though still a bit of a chump); Barbara Stanwyck, as the deadliest of femme fatales; and Edward G Robinson, the career-gangster now turned softy with "a heart as big as a house".