Straight down the line

Double Indemnity

(1944)

Now there's a dame to murder for. Can I just confess that I wasted my youth thinking that Barbara Stanwyck was just a thoroughly unappealing ranch matriarch on TV? Consider that another black mark on the ledger of the U.S. educational system. She's now a hundred years old and dead, and she's still hotter than Rachel McAdams.

I guess this film is generally considered a phone-in job by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and yeah, I guess I can see that the plotting is a little creaky in spots, and that, in theory at least, it depends a little two heavily on the dying-guy-confessing-into-the-Dictaphone frame, but good lord, the dialogue; and good lord, Edward G. Robinson and his "little man" that tells him when a claim is fishy; and good lord, the helplessness of a schlub like Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff in the face and ankle and everything in between of Phyllis Dietrichson. Maybe less than great, but it'll do.