“Okay baby, whatever you say.”
Walter Neff
First things first: yes, the blonde wig worn by the hauntingly brilliant Miss Stanwyck was downright weird, and Billy Wilder later went along with public opinion and claimed to have regretted that theatrical device. That was his mistake, not using the wig in the first place, but agreeing with the public that he shouldn’t have. But I have long maintained that it was another stroke of gifted visual storytelling, since it emphasized metaphorically, even symbolized or embodied, precisely how phony, deceitful and artificial the Cain character of peroxide Phyllis really was. After all, sweet Barbara skillfully delivered to us all, on a peroxide platter, possibly the most sinister femme fatale in all of dark cinema (aka noir): a devilish creature who uses the insurance agent Neff’s own glands against him in her plot to murder her unsuspecting hubby.
Noir was just coming of age as a cinematic style, for me a preferable term rather than the customary genre tag, and Brackett and Wilder contributed a new hard-edged brand of stark darkness which did indeed initiate a full scale embrace of one of the soon to be supremely successful Hollywood motifs. Except of course for the fact that after co-writing films for Lubitsch, Leisen and Hawks and then producing some of Wilder’s own early seminal classics such as The Major and the Minor and Five Graves to Cairo, Brackett couldn’t cope with the narrative grime and had to temporarily bow out of their partnership, only returning the following year to pen and produce Lost Weekend and later on Sunset Boulevard.
Without consciously striving to do so, the consummate film storyteller Wilder, with the help of Brackett’s substitute writer the soused Raymond Chandler, had introduced, through the anxious lens of national combat, a style capable of also conveying the richly tense paradoxes of personal and domestic combat. It was a pristine aesthetic and an icy emotional style of highly visual poetry that came to be identified with their work through the mid to late forties and up to their rubicon, as identified ideally by Sikov: brutal lyricism. And Brackett and Wilder, both together and apart, would very artfully submit for our dreadful edification one of the finest examples of sheer noir genius in cinematic history, Double Indemnity, except it would have to proceed without Charlie’s aborted participation. In my recent book on their partnership cross some thirteen films together, Double Solitaire, I chronicled the chaotic creativity they inspired in each other, making masterful works of cinematic art in unison, despite the odd fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.
Applause Books on Cinema (Bloomsbury)
1943 had descended on the troubled team with a sense of foreboding, at least on the Brackett side. The Wilder side was too occupied with being agitated and ambitious to really notice much else. Granted, he was also rapidly moving into one of the most creative phases of his career. On March 9, Brackett observed stoically in his private diary, “Worked with Billy from 10 to 12, the banal viscous drops.” And on March 11, the real crux of their crisis became more obvious, “Billy got a telephone call and consulted me about Double Indemnity, a story Joe Sistrom suggested to him which he wants to do, not leaving Joe out. I got the hint and talked it over with Leland and we decided Billy was having a touch of claustrophobia at being tied down to working with me, so I told him to go ahead with Joe. Buddy De Sylva nixed it, saying we should stay together. Hope Billy’s claustrophobia didn’t clutch him harder at those words, which I confess were a great relief to me.”
In the meantime, Brackett distracted himself with work on the script and production of The Uninvited, with Ray Milland, the first day of shooting for which was April 15. Unfortunately, his attempt to distract himself in an independent project had some unforeseen consequences at the other end of the conference table. On May 10, Brackett observed that “I find the pleasure I have been taking in The Uninvited has been completely poisoned by Billy’s return, and my pleasure in life as well.” Two weeks later an attempt was made to put some distance between himself and the younger cranky genius, “I told Billy I was getting another office. He protested the move, fearing I think that he’ll lose his office if I move.” By June, Wilder had commenced the actual writing on his next film Double Indemnity, although he had yet to decide on the male lead actor. In mid-July Brackett detected an elevation in Wilder’s usually morose mood, “Billy was in high spirits today, for some manic-depressive cause beyond my understanding.”
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=double+indemnity#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0d0afb0c,vid:I-LZbpPJQM4,st:0
While watching the early rushes for Double Indemnity, Brackett was unable to conceal his decided disdain, saying that he found them a little monotonous in their single note of vile brutality. This sudden turn toward the dark side was seemingly fueled by a wartime appetite for bad people doing bad things, and most surprisingly of all, many of the actors and actresses who had built substantial careers on their signature images of good, cute, kind, humane roles, now were matched with directors who wanted to show a more human, if less humane, side of our natures. The best example of this shift would naturally be both Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, he a lightweight comedic actor of great skill and her a charmingly lighthearted girl next door type.
But when the visionary Billy Wilder chose them both to play against their typecasting in his classic noir Double Indemnity, something that made Stanwyck quite nervous, he was also inviting them to take a chance which may or may not threaten their commercial popularity. Double Indemnity was an example of a dictum detected by Charlotte Chandler in her late, end of career talks with Wilder. “Billy Wilder lived by his wits, and his characters often lived by theirs. Sometimes they died by their wits.” Wilder often downplayed the aesthetics of his craft, avoiding artsy explanations of how or why he did what he did, in favour of more seemingly self-effacing approaches, along the lines of: the main characters in Double Indemnity have a problem. They aren’t living the American dream, and they hope to correct that. The game is as important as the gain. I just made the pictures I would have liked to see myself. When I was lucky, it coincided with the taste of the audience. With Double Indemnity, I was very very lucky.”
Not only did it not damage either of the actors professionally at all, instead it was the key to launching them both into a whole other dimension of their acting craft, and one that the public apparently adored. If not for that latter career phase, we might not remember either of them quite so vividly. Describing some of the idealized beauty, snappy dialogue and quick witted behaviors of the greatest noir performances, even if those behaviors spelled their inevitable doom, TCM’s Eddie Muller summed up our fondness for these usually unsavory folks very well, “If only we could all think this fast and look this good. In the final analysis, that probably sums up noir’s eternal appeal as well as anything. Today, the cynicism and fatalism found in classic seems almost comforting compared to the pessimism we confront on movie screens. We watch noir with endless fascination and an undeniable aspect of our fascination is the realization that, as a culture, we will never be that stylish again.”
Double Indemnity, was released July 3, 1944, Paramount Pictures, Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Joseph Sistrom, Screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, based on the 1943 novel by James M. Cain. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison, Music by Miklos Rozsa. Featuring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Byron Burr, Richard Gaines, John Philliber. Duration: 107 minutes. Paul Schrader, as both a filmmaker and a historian, has always been the most reliable appreciator of what made noir so noirish. “During the war a new mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness had crept into the American cinema. Double Indemnity was the best written, the most characteristically film noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what it was: small-time, undreamed, unheroic.”
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James Cain based his novella on an actual 1927 murder perpetrated by a Queens New York woman and her lover whose trial he attended while working as a journalist; the story started circulating around Hollywood in 1936, the year he became famous for the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, published the year before. Studios were wary due to the sinister vibe of the story, similar in many ways to that enacted on screen by John Garfield and Lana Turner in his earlier Postman story. The censors found no redeeming merits to the lurid project: “The general low tone and sordid flavour of this story makes it, in our judgment, thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation before mixed audiences. It is most important to avoid ‘the hardening of audiences’ to the thought and fact of crime.”
Still, Double Indemnity is an absolute masterpiece (which Brackett later gladly acknowledged) quite rightly considered a landmark in the noir style trend that most accurately commenced with the opulently visual gem of Citizen Kane by Orson Welles three years earlier. In Robert Kolker’s fine compendium called Film, Form and Culture, the author emphasized Wilder’s aesthetic roots by identifying him as “the German director, Billy Wilder” and noting the appetite for the reminder of the decade for “The palpable slats of light from the venetian blinds became visual convention in forties cinema.” But it was the structure of the gloomy dialogue and the deadpan narration which truly made a mark on audiences and critics alike.
“It synthesized noir’s essential generic elements—bitter ironic dialogue, a weak male character who falls prey to a female predator, and a mise-en scene unrelentingly gray and claustrophobic. The streets add to the pervading atmosphere of limited sleazy lives.” Observing that there is as little sentimentality in this film as Hollywood could allow, Kolker was also astute enough to catch the inherent paradox at the heart of this acidic mode, the fact that it can be read in two ways, like all great art. It is “either a misogynist film about a terrifying, destroying woman, or it a film that liberates the female character from the restrictive and oppressed melodramatic situations that render her helpless. Feminist critics are divided in their views of this film and the noir genre as a whole.”
The core sensibility of early noir was ironically already present in Brackett and Wilder’s second independent project, Five Graves, but it may have been lost on some viewers since the setting was a sweltering desert and not a rainy urban street, but all the hallmarks were already there, waiting for the right moment to emerge. There seem to be two schools of thought on the causes of the temporary spit-up between the ambitious young director and his senior writer-producer partner while contemplating Double Indemnity in 1943. One school has it that although this film represented the first serious blow to both the collaborative partnership and their personal relationship, by 1942 Brackett had already decided that if he were to be forced into a parallel role of producer then he may as well make the best of it and actually produce something non-Wilder as well. Hence decidedly uptempo ghost story The Uninvited.
Anthony Slide, editor of the Brackett diaries, has noted that in 1944, “The number of projects with which Brackett and Wilder are involved during the year is quite confusing, with many film proposals mentioned only once in passing.” This seems to be indicative of a team that is flailing about, trying to tread water with each one using the other to hold themselves afloat without pulling both of them down underwater. Surprisingly, given his initial reactions to this film, Brackett eventually found it to be “an absolute knockout of a picture, the most flawless bit of picture technique imaginable. When I got to the studio Billy was arriving, pretending that none of his friends had liked the picture.” And yet the future, a future, any future, beckoned to both partners, and they went to a meeting with Buddy De Sylva to discuss upcoming plans. By May 15, Brackett “had ironed the annoyances out of my soul and spent a morning of hard work with Billy.”
Still, the chasm continued to erode, with Brackett observing one day in August, “A curious and by now familiar excitement. Billy hurried away. I asked him what was up. He said that they had figured it out that to get the most out of us there must always be one picture together, then one apart—like Double Indemnity and The Uninvited. Went home depressed, though I’ve long felt that a parting of the ways was inevitable. Sorry it has to happen when Billy is in so entirely agreeable a mood.” Such agreeability however was always very short-lived, with November recording a visit to Wilder’s home to work together. “At the end of the evening, Billy put on a real scene: the neurotic genius at the end of his rope. It was the most palpable ruse of a stubborn person bent on achieving what he wants.”
Brackett felt that he had two choices: to continue his present course, a life “buffered against the difficulties of Hollywood by Billy Wilder, or to end our association, without animosity but in exhaustion.” At that point, Wilder too started searching for projects he could do without Brackett, and Double Indemnity, a film which has gone down in Hollywood history as one that Brackett detested as distastefully unsavory and, after initially trying, refused to ultimately write the screenplay for. Both scenarios might be true at the same time, with both partners straining to do work free of the other, but Brackett still wrote the initial treatment for it with Wilder, and even if he didn’t want to finish the writing aspect he still seems to have been prepared to produce it for Wilder. But on March 16, 1943, Brackett got the distinct impression from Wilder that he would prefer if Joe Sistrom produce it instead, to which Brackett entered a diary response, “I got the hint…so I told him to go ahead with Joe.”
As speculated upon in The Dissolve, “At this point, years of suppressed bitterness began to boil over. Brackett was called in to many story meetings with Wilder’s new collaborator, Raymond Chandler, and Wilder also met with Brackett about The Uninvited, but things were sour, and both men were evaluating what they got from the partnership. Brackett in particular was feeling inadequate.” As he wrote in his diary chronicle, “In Billy’s manner there is a carefully groomed suggestion of the brush-off. And why the hell shouldn’t he brush me off. He’s done the major part of our work for the past three years, and the fact that I made considerable sacrifices to get him his director’s job has been amply repaid. Also I am happy in the belief that, while not as good without Billy, I’m pretty good—and more self-respecting.” But, why not be brushed off? Really? Well for one thing, Brackett still had the glistening brilliance of both Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard to contribute, well worth the effort as I see it.
In Hollywood circles it was widely believed that both men secretly hoped that the other would fail without their mutual collaboration. Both were wrong on that count too, with Wilder’s new noir being an instant classic, and Brackett’s ghost story being rather well received. Wilder, perhaps feeling bugged that his partner was being praised without him, bestowed his typically cynical form of Billy-accolade: “You cheated on me! I expected you to come back with a social disease—instead, you come back with a baby!” And Brackett himself was not quite immune to a similar assessment of his former mentee, as when in December he saw an early cut of Double Indemnity and opined, “The direction is uneven and some of the writing extremely poor. And my black heart sung like a bird.”
Edward G., the surprising hero of Double Indemnity
The storyline of one of Wilder’s most notorious and exceptionally gifted films was one that Hollywood had long thought to be unfilmable, mostly because of the moral codes office’s fear of James M. Cain’s breathtakingly evil 1936 story and 1943 novel. Originally, Wilder had planned to direct a snappy musical as the follow up to his war picture Five Graves, but while dreaming it up he was stopped in his tracks by a competing movie and a very good one, Cover Girl. “I realized that no matter how good my musical would be most people would say it was no Cover Girl. So this Double Indemnity project looked like a better chance to set Hollywood back on its heels.” As has often been observed, to make this film work, given its disturbing anti-hero/anti-heroine match up, would require the skillful juggling of paradoxical impulses in the audience, requiring an almost impossible balance of cinematic finesse and a deeply human treatment of the inhuman characters caught in the throes of their vulgar compulsions.
Many years later Wilder was interviewed by Garson Kanin about Brackett, long after he had more or less successfully convinced himself that he was the sole driving force in their partnership, and he couched the experience in strangely domestic terms, almost as a kind of professional adultery. “1944 was The Year of Infidelities, Charlie produced The Uninvited. I had nothing to do with it. I wrote Double Indemnity with Raymond Chandler….and I don’t think he ever forgave me. He always thought I cheated on him with Raymond Chandler. He got very possessive after that.” Not too surprisingly, Brackett had a different take on the turn of events, telling the same interviewer that, “Billy got so despondent about being without me that I did Lost Weekend with him, a depressing film about an alcoholic writer who has trouble writing.”
It should be stated however that when he did view the final cut version of Double Indemnity, Brackett relented and exclaimed that it was brilliant, an “absolute knockout”, and concluded “I am glad to report in myself a kind of rejoicing that it was such a superb thing.” He would still lament later on though, as if in a kind of self-judgment, “Double Indemnity got the best reviews ever, and I guess that’ll teach me.” Luckily for both men, Brackett’s temporary writing replacement, the perennially plastered Raymond Chandler, although an able and proven novelist and sinister storyteller, was a person for whom Wilder quickly developed an undiluted hatred. Collaborative stresses were not new to him of course, since the Brackett and Wilder working method, screaming, fighting, storming off and returning again to the job at hand, had inadvertently created a uniquely powerful bond between them, maybe even a warped kind of love.
But in the case of Chandler, who nevertheless handed in a serviceable and very Chandler-like script, it was all warp, with zero love, or even respect. He referred to his exposure to this “volatile, bullheaded foreigner who couldn’t stop pacing” which left him physically and emotional exhausted. Writing to his British publisher Hamish Hamilton, Chandler declared defiantly that “Working with Billy Wilder was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.” He later followed up the assessment with an unnamed set of targets in a vitriolic screed against Hollywood: “The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they set out to do) the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothings they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.” All of that might have been accurate, in fact most Hollywood insiders would recognize Chandler’s weather report as just daily life, and some of them, such as Wilder, were actually able to thrive splendidly in that very combustible echo chamber.
And just as Wilder always knew how good his own work was, he likewise knew how good Double Indemnity was, despite its many challenges to life and limb. He was totally serious when he arrived on set one day and demanded complete silence: “Keep it quiet! After all, history is being made here!” And so it was. Billy thought he had been ‘lucky’ with the brilliantly dank noir thriller Double Indemnity, which was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, but which won nothing. Except of course for winning the fervent adoration of generations of dark cinema lovers. As Wilder put it later on, his reaction to eventually achieving the gold carnival ring in Hollywood was almost stunning to him, “One day it happens. Success happens and it catches you by surprise. One day you are a signature, the next day, you are an autograph.” In his case, an indelible and dark one.
Yes, Charlie was the cousin of my great great grandfather. Hence my recent book Double Solitaire using details from his private diaries about Billy.
Are you related to Charles?