I know all their tricks, I lie awake nights thinking
up tricks, so I'll be ready for them when they
come at me. And then one night I think up
a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel
myself if I could only put a plant out there to
put down my bet.
-Walter Huff, Double
Indemnity
Walter Huff is just your run-of-the-mill insurance salesman, maybe a slightly sharper operator than most, until the day he stops by the Nirdlinger place to renew a policy and meets the new Mrs. Nirdlinger, Phyllis. She takes an unusual interest in the details of her husband's coverage, even needling Walter about the possibility of switching to the Automobile Club :
She talked along, and there was nothing I could do
but go along with it. But you sell as many
people as I do, you don't go by what they say.
You feel it, how the deal is going. And after a
while I knew this woman didn't care anything about
the Automobile Club. Maybe the husband did,
but she didn't. There was something else,
and this was nothing but a stall. I figured it would be
some kind of a proposition to split the commission,
maybe so she could get a ten-spot out of it
without the husband knowing. There's plenty
of that going on. And I was just wondering what I
would say to her. A reputable agent don't
get mixed up in stuff like that, but she was walking
around the room, and I saw something I hadn't noticed
before. Under those blue pajamas was a
shape to set a man nuts, and how good I was going
to sound when I started explaining the high
ethics of the insurance business I didn't exactly
know.
But all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt
a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots
of my hair. 'Do you handle accident insurance ?'
Walter is just stupid enough, because he thinks he's so smart, that he helps Phyllis plan the perfect crime; together they'll murder her husband and make it look like an accident so they can claim the double indemnity payment on his insurance policy, a policy that they'll purchase without his knowledge. But in order to get away with it they'll have to fool the company's paranoid claims man :
Keyes is head of the Claim Department, and the most
tiresome man to do business with in the whole
world. You can't even say today is Tuesday
without he has to look on the calendar, and then check
if it's this year's calendar or last year's calendar,
and then find out what company printed the
calendar, and then find out if their calendar checks
with the World Almanac calendar. That amount
of useless work you'd think would keep down his
weight, but it don't. He gets fatter every year,
and more peevish, and he's always in some kind of
a feud with other departments of the company,
and does nothing but sit with his collar open, and
sweat, and quarrel, and argue, until your head
begins spinning around just to be in the same room
with him. But he's a wolf on a phony claim.
Walter has just enough sense to know how long the odds are, but he's hooked :
I live in a bungalow in the Los Feliz hills.
Daytime, I keep a Filipino house boy, but he don't sleep
there. It was raining that night, so I didn't
go out. I lit a fire and sat there, trying to figure out
where I was at. I knew where I was at, of
course. I was standing right on the deep end, looking
over the edge, and I kept telling myself to get
out of there, and get quick, and never come back.
But that was what I kept telling myself. What
I was doing was peeping over that edge, and all the
time I was trying to pull away from it, there was
something in me that kept edging a little closer,
trying to get a better look.
So he's in it 'til the bitter end, but the biggest problem, bigger even than Keyes, is that he and Phyllis will have to trust one another completely. They can't afford to question each other's loyalty or motives at all, because :
That's all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.
And, of course, since this is James M. Cain, there's not just one drop, there's a veritable deluge.
No one has ever written noir better than Cain. It's easy to see
why he was so influential, particularly on the French existentialists (see
Orrin's review of The Stranger
by Camus). But they seem to have missed one very important, and quintessentially
American, point. These tales are starkly moralistic. For all
that the characters may behave amorally, as soon as as they take that step
over the edge we know that a sure and brutal reckoning awaits. There's
something positively Puritanical about the whole genre, where satisfying
your basest desires brings down a nearly cosmic justice upon your head.
I like that.
(Reviewed:12-Mar-01)
Grade: (A+)
