From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- The Dance Of The Red Death- James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry foe James M. Cain’s classic crime noir novel Double Indemnity.

Book Review

Double Indemnity, James M. Cain, Avon Books, 1943

No question I am under the spell of 1930s crime novelist James M Cain having recently watched Billy Wilder’s 1944 film adaptation of his Double Indemnity starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck and as a result went back to re-read the novella. So part of this review will be a comparison of the two way of presenting a first-rate crime noir and part will be an argument for someone to take up the challenge of doing a remake of that film hewing closer to the line put down by Cain in the book.

Of course one does not need James M. Cain (or contemporaries Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and a few other crime novelists of note) to tell us that crime does not pay, does not pay in the short or long haul as the story line unfolds here. We were mother-wise (or made mother-wise) to that when we were in diapers (and maybe before). Moreover one does not need Brother Cain to pick seemingly average, if perhaps not Iowa-Nebraska corn field normal, 1930s proto-types that inhabited the Southern California landscape before the Joads and the okie arkie invasion scrambled everything up to populate his story. Characters confronted by the end of the road ocean frontier swallowed up a couple of generations of wanderers, card sharks, swindlers, confidence men (and women), faith healers, shakers, quakers, wild boys looking for highway kicks, midnight shifters, drifters and grifters and created California modern. But it does take James M Cain to probe the depths of those two themes, the interaction between them and what kind of red death hell broth mix ensued.

Oh yes, and maybe throw some dough, some serious 1930s dough although every schoolboy (or girl) today would laugh at what the protagonists went through for allowance money. Today it would have to be billions in order to draw the latest generation away from texting or whatever the hell it is that they are doing. So Walter (an insurance guy, naturally since that is where some dough could be found, some dough short of armed bank robberies) and a very married Phyllis, who just happens to be a bored and underappreciated housewife married to a wrong gee, a wrong gee for her. So dough, passion (maybe, maybe for Walter), hell, just ennui and you have all the ingredients for one very dead husband. Damn let’s call it by its right name. Murder, murder pure and simple and the devil take the hinter post. Well we know the end because we know crime doesn’t pay. But what we don’t know is how our two lovebirds will “take the gaff” when insurance companies and cops start eating away at their stories. And eating away at their “love.”

That is where the film and book part company a little. In the end they are going to turn on each other for a simple reason-to shut the other one up and get away clean. But the film just kind of glances at those betrayals and the implication that there is more to Phyllis’ story that just a new found passion for fast-talking insurance salesmen. She has a past and while we can’t blame Walter for being bewitched by whatever fragrance she was swearing he might have dug a little deeper into her biography. No question. The book, more interestingly, gives Phyllis a whole rather bizarre back story, a story that we today have no trouble seeing as pathological, hell, psycho. A ritualistic return to some ancient blood red dance of death most powerfully displayed in the book’s last pages just as the moon rears its head to give its blessing. That almost involuntary activity on Phyllis’ part with Walter dragged in would create a very compelling finish to what otherwise might today just be seen as another ho-hum insurance scam. Somebody should re-write that old film script with Cain’s novella in his or her lap.