With horribly lighted rooms, a manipulating femme fatal, and
a narrator who is or about to be dead plus, a murder there’s no doubt that both
the movie and book of Double Indemnity is a film noir. The first thing
that comes into play to make this a noir is the foreshadowing, when Walter Neff
walks into him office his arm is staring to bleed and he begins to tell Mr.
Keyes about with he’s done on an ancient voice recorder. That leads you right
into the femme fatal of the story Mrs. Phyllis Dietrichson who is more powerful
then Walter would’ve ever realized, after all he thought he was making all the decisions,
little did he know Phyllis was the behind the scenes controlling everything.
The scene that shows her power perfectly is when Walter finally meets Mr.
Dietrichson, if you look at the whole picture you can tell the Phyllis is the
higher power of the whole situation just stringing her puppets along. The movie
doesn’t really become dark until after the murder, showing the switching of
mood. But if I could discuss of specific scenes where the audience views
Phyllis as Walter does would have to be after they have something intimate or
something. They are both sitting on Walters couch, the same room they were in
before but this time for some reason only one light on the light right where
Phyllis is sitting. Although Walter who is sitting on the other side of the
couch is in the shadows, showing that she is maybe good or somewhat good…at
least to Walter.
As I was saying earlier, the contains a long flashback of
Walter Neff’s when the movie starts, the flashback shows the encounter between
both Phyllis Dietrichson and Walter Neff. The flashback really starts the story
off well with a good visual picture, it’s not one of those movies that has a
narrator and you never find out who it is, it also puts it as he is telling the
story from his point of view because obviously if it was from Phyllis’ we would’ve
gotten a totally different story. The narration really puts you in the mood for
the noir your about to watch, grabbing your attention the something dangerous
is about to happen. I think if the film wasn’t narrated like that it wouldn’t have
ruined my experience, yet I did real the book. Maybe coming from somebody who hadn’t
read the book would have felt differently.
