Seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress, Best Picture and Best Director (Billy Wilder). Film noir at its best, as jaded insurance man Fred MacMurray and bored housewife Barbara Stanwyck team up to murder her husband and collect on the policy. They fool ace insurance inspector Edward G. Robinson, but getting away with murder turns out to be a full-time job. Wilder co-authored the Oscar-nominated script with detective fiction great Raymond Chandler. –AFI
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city’s largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929, and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Wilder immediately realized his Jewish ancestry would cause problems, so he emigrated to Paris, then the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner, and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment), he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood’s classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing, and the two turned out such classics… read more
Another sad entry in the criminal history of British barbering! For it is a remarkable fact that any time the protagonist of a Brit flick
C’est l’histoire d’un monde qui se soucie un peu plus de l’argent que de l’être humain. D’assureurs qui préfèrent en perdre le moins possible quitte à ne pas soucier de la personne. C’est l’histoire… read review
“Double Indemnity” is one of the all-time greats and one of the first big film noirs. It was adapted by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder from the novella of the same name by James M. Cain and turned… read review
To me, films are like chocolate (bad ones are dark), and you can really taste the uniqueness in flavor when it comes to Double Indemnity, and I gotta tell you baby, it tastes lovely. Film noir has… read review
(Originally written June 15, 2007)
I’ve probably seen this American classic more than any other with the exception of Duck Soup. For the longest time, it was, for me, Billy Wilder’s greatest… read review