Matthew Jackson and Mental Floss present 10 Fascinating Facts About Double Indemnity. Not only is Double Indemnity one of my favorite noirs, it is one of my favorite films. Period. Speaking of favorites, here are three of my favorite Double Indemnity facts…
1. IT WAS INSPIRED BY A REAL MURDER.
Before he began making serious headway as a writer of fiction, Double Indemnity author James M. Cain worked as a journalist in New York, and it was there that he stumbled upon the real-life murder case of Albert Snyder, who was killed in 1927 by his wife, Ruth Brown Snyder, and her lover, a corset salesman named Henry Judd Gray. Before committing the murder, Brown took out a $100,000 life insurance policy on her husband, then tried to kill him several times, but was unsuccessful. She ultimately turned to Gray for help in the murder plot, and both were ultimately executed for the murder in 1928.
Cain used the case as the inspiration for two of his earliest and most famous stories. His first novel, 1934’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, is about a man who falls in love with a beautiful woman and then helps her—unsuccessfully, at first—murder her older husband. The novel quickly made its way to Hollywood, where the Hays Production Code—which provided moral oversight for movie production—was just beginning to be strictly enforced, so the story languished without a film adaptation for years.
In the meantime, Cain wrote Double Indemnity, another story of a man swept up in a plot to murder his lover’s husband, this time with an insurance scam added. The story was serialized in the pages of Liberty magazine in 1936, but was first submitted as a potential Hollywood property in 1935. Double Indemnity finally made it to the screen in 1944, and The Postman Always Rings Twice followed with its own well-received film version in 1946. (It was remade in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, from a script by David Mamet.)
7. STUDIO EXECUTIVES HATED STANWYCK’S WIG.
Stanwyck’s performance in Double Indemnity was hailed as one of her best even in 1944, when critics and executives were finally seeing the completed film, but there was one complaint that kept going around, and that some viewers still notice: her hair. Though it may seem like an immovable part of the film now, the blonde wig Phyllis wears was a noticeable change to Stanwyck’s overall look at the time, and some viewers complained that it looked too cheap and fake. One executive at Paramount, after seeing some early footage, commented: “We hire Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.”
Having Stanwyck go blonde for the film was Wilder’s idea, and while he told people for years that the wig was chosen to intentionally convey something showy and even trashy about Phyllis, he later admitted that was just the answer he made up after realizing he made a mistake with the choice of wig a bit too late.
“But after the picture is half-finished, after I shot for four weeks with Stanwyck, now I know I made a mistake. I can’t say, ‘Look tomorrow, you ain’t going to be wearing the blonde wig.’ I’m stuck … I can’t reshoot four weeks of stuff. I’m totally stuck. I’ve committed myself; the mistake was caught too late. Fortunately it did not hurt the picture. But it was too thick, we were not very clever about wig-making. But when people say, ‘My god, that wig. It looked phony,’ I answer ‘You noticed that? That was my intention. I wanted the phoniness in the girl, bad taste, phony wig.’ That is how I get out of it.”
8. THE ORIGINAL ENDING FEATURED NEFF’S EXECUTION.
Cain’s original novella ends with the two lovers committing suicide together, but since suicide was forbidden by the Production Code, Wilder and Chandler had to develop an alternate ending, and came up with the notion that Neff would shoot Phyllis after she wounds him, and he would then return to the insurance office to record his confession, only to be discovered by Barton Keyes, a claims adjuster and co-worker. The film famously ends with Walter collapsed on the floor, with Keyes lighting a cigarette for him as sirens approach outside, but the original script actually went further, showing Neff’s arrest and his eventual execution in a gas chamber. Wilder even shot the gas chamber ending, but cut it for two reasons: The PCA was concerned the details were too gruesome, and Wilder himself felt that it was ultimately unnecessary to the story.
“I shot that whole thing in the gas chamber, the execution, when everything was still, with tremendous accuracy. But then I realized, look this thing is already over. I just already have one tag outside that office, when Neff collapses on the way to the elevator, where he can’t even light the match,” he recalled. “And from the distance, you hear the sirens, be it an ambulance or be it the police, you know it is over. No need for the gas chamber.”
