Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Richard Crenna) is seduced by housewife Phyllis Dietrickson (Samantha Eggar) into killing her husband. Walter falsifies an accident policy for the husband that has a double indemnity clause: it pays double if the insured dies in a train accident. Their one foreseeable problem is Barton Keyes (Lee J. Cobb), a crack insurance investigator and Neff’s friend, who isn’t likely to let things go. Then there is the far more dangerous problem that they never considered, that it is only a matter of time before Walter and Phyllis turn on each other.
So soon after reviewing the remake of the classic The Mark of Zorro I’m back with the same situation: a 1970s TV version of a great 1940s movie that had helped define its genre. This time the classic is 1944’s Double Indemnity, a pivotal Film Noir work. And like the remake of The Mark of Zorro, this is an unnecessary, pedestrian affair that shows how good the original was.
There are few additions to the Billy Wilder/Raymond Chandler script that had served Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson so well. But there are numerous cuts, bringing the film down from 107 minutes to a commercial friendly 75. Every cut hurts the film, as we lose the humor, Neff & Keyes’s relationship, and most of the step daughter’s subplot. But the deletions don’t damn it. Make the same cuts to a print of the ’44 version and you’ve still got a terrific flick. Nope, the real problems lie with the cast, and to a greater extent with the director.
Richard Crenna does create a cynical and sleazy insurance salesman. It’s not a bad performance and if it had been in another film, I’d be praising it. However, it isn’t Neff. Crenna’s man has few values and little faith, but he isn’t the jaded, empty soul that MacMurray created. MacMurray’s Neff was willing to join in on a murder simply because there was no reason not to; it might be something fun to do, though nothing was ever that much fun. Crenna’s isn’t that gone, which leaves a big hole in the story: why does this Neff commit murder? The money’s not good enough, and he doesn’t love Phyllis (with the two actor’s lack of chemistry, he doesn’t even appear to notice her). This Neff would have forgotten about killing and instead gone out to a bar to pick up “cheap broads.”
Samantha Eggar is attractive enough to play the ultimate femme fatale, but she lacks the mystery, edge, and power. She’s cute, with lovely long red hair and a pleasing accent, but never displays an allure that would cause men to kill. She doesn’t come off as dangerous, but merely as a bored housewife.
The exception to the casting blunders is Lee J. Cobb. He devours the part of Keyes, displaying the proper mix of fanaticism, fatigue, and affection. His only flaw is that he isn’t Edward G. Robinson, but then, who is?
But forget the actors. This movie is won or lost on direction, and Jack Smight (responsible for the rapes of the works of SF giants Ray Bradbury and Roger Zelazny: The Illustrated Man and Damnation Alley, as well as numerous generic TV shows) is no Billy Wilder. Constrained by an insufficient television budget, he plops the story on film like half cooked spaghetti. There’s no sign of imagination or even an understanding that how a scene is shot make a difference in what that scene means. Take Phyllis’s entrance. Here she’s just some hot chick in a towel answering the door. Thirty years earlier, she was an enigma, standing high above Neff and looking down on him, both literally and figuratively.
With plain, brightly lit shots, Smight has pulled the Noir from this Film Noir classic. As the script axed the comedy, all that’s left is a none-too suspenseful soap opera. However, some value can be taken from this anemic bore. It is highly instructive to student directors and beginning film critics to compare the two versions of Double Indemnity and see why the first is superior. Luckily, the only way the ’73 take is available is as an extra on the second disc of the two disc Double Indemnity collectors addition. As an extra, it isn’t bad at all. As a film, forget it.