Making a conspiracy against her husband, Phyllis, an attractive woman, who has an affair with the insurance salesman with whom she unites to murder her husband, in order to take the insurance policy, but when the investigator friend of her husband investigates in the case, incidents come to challenge her.
Even though you already know it isn't going to end well, it's suffused with a clammy-handed anxiety that belies its age. The dialogue, too, is classic Wilder -- almost poetic in its snappy, purple lyricism.
MacMurray has seldom given a better performance. It is somewhat different from his usually light roles, but is always plausible and played with considerable restraint.
The film is a brilliant collision of evil and the mundane, and one of the reasons viewers respond to it so well is that it makes the mundane seem a little sexier in the resulting debris.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
January 20, 2015
Film noir is the most intoxicating of Hollywood cocktails, and none is more potent than Double Indemnity.
