Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, co-scripted by Raymond Chandler, and based on a novel by James M. Cain, opens with the silhouette of a man who proceeds toward the camera until the screen grows black. After the credits, the blackness dissolves into fog and we are soon introduced to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) who, talking into a tape recorder, recounts the incidents that have brought him to his office at this time, bleeding, and slowly lurching toward death. Neff, an insurance salesman, had been lured by a bored, middle-class housewife into a plot to murder her husband with the intention of collecting the insurance money.

Throughout the plotting of the murder, and the subsequent attempts to stay one step ahead of Neff’s suspicious and persistent boss (Edward G. Robinson), it is the woman, played by Stanwyck, who is in control. As Foster Hirsch writes, Stanwyck’s role in Double Indemnity is “a grotesque in women’s clothing, a character conceived by men who hate and fear strong women” (152).

The homicidal lovers of Wilder’s classic shoot each other in the end, their scheme having failed due to their distrust of each other more than anything else. A similar fate befalls the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Lewis Milestone’s bizarre drama of a powerful woman (Stanwyck) and her weak-willed husband (Kirk Douglas in his film debut) who, as children, collaborated in the murder of her domineering grandmother. Now, as the most powerful couple in town, they find their position threatened when a childhood friend (Van Heflin), who they believe witnessed the murder, returns to his hometown. Paranoia has gotten the best of them, and their brutal efforts to silence a man who knows nothing of their crime leads to the very downfall their treatment of him was intended to prevent. The end echoes the climax of Double Indemnity with a perverse twist. Instead of husband and wife shooting each other, the wife pulls the trigger on the gun that her husband is pointing at her, killing herself before the man follows her lead and also commits suicide. Even more so than in Double Indemnity, the woman wields the power. The man is a mere puppet.

Even when playing the victim in noir, Stanwyck dominated her surroundings. In Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), she is the bedridden wife of a man (Burt Lancaster) whose efforts to liberate himself from her control ultimately lead to her murder, and to his downfall.

Like Double Indemnity and many noirs, Sorry, Wrong Number is told in flashback to highlight the role that fate has played in the lives of the characters. Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), a film heavily influenced by noir, describes the flashback technique as a way to establish “an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate, and an all-enveloping hopelessness”

Flashbacks do not play a role in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, but few film noirs convey a sense of desperation and hopelessness more effectively than this classic of the genre. Dassin, perhaps best known for his later, lighter films, Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964), both starring his wife, the sultry Greek actress Melina Mercouri, began his career in noir, first helming the semi-documentary Naked City (1948), which later inspired a popular television series, then directing his masterpiece, Night and the City.

Highly Expressionistic in style, Night and the City’s vivid depiction of a hustler conniving his way through the London underworld is highlighted by Richard Widmark’s finest performance. As Harry Fabian, “an artist without an art,” Widmark, to quote Foster Hirsch, “palpably conveys his character’s mounting desperation, his struggle against impossible odds” (160). Despite enjoying one of Hollywood’s most durable careers which included roles as Jim Bowie opposite John Wayne’s Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960) and as the Dauphin in Otto Preminger’s misguided adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1957), Widmark continues to be strongly identified with noir, a result of his having performed so effectively on its dark, desperate stage.

The influence of Italian Neo-Realism on noir was the result of producer Louis de Rochemont’s entry into the genre with 1945’s The House on 92nd Street. Shot on location, and featuring a narration the likes of which would later become a signature of Jack Webb’s Dragnet television series, the semi-documentary approach, memorably used in Naked City and The Street with No Name, often included detailed accounts of the way in which law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, operate, focusing on techniques and procedures, often to the accompaniment of stirring, patriotic music. These films, though often just as visually dark and sinister as the original, Expressionistic noir films, were, nonetheless, more upbeat, leading some critics to dismiss them outright as the polar opposite of the genre (Walker 37).

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