Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  This narration is often redundant. When he walks around the Dietrichson home, Walter tells us in words what we already see; such verbal reinforcement is Wilder’s writerly weakness. There are several points in this movie when Walter is going about his business and we can see what he’s doing and feeling (MacMurray is outstanding as this weak man corrupted by his job), yet when we see Walter bowling, for instance, Wilder has Walter’s voiceover tell us that he’s bowling, and why. Wilder doesn’t quite trust the audience, and falls victim, sometimes, to over-explaining.

  The question remains whether Wilder impedes or helps Stanwyck’s performance as Phyllis. By my lights he sometimes does get in her way, not only with that blond wig, but in subtler ways, both visual and verbal—yet she barrels right through him anyway and does some of her most complex work. Her Phyllis is introduced standing at the top of a staircase, wearing only a towel and holding her sunglasses, so that Walter and the camera peer up at her. But there’s nothing too sexual about this entrance; Wilder is too busy giggling. Walter is looking for her husband, he says, to discuss an automobile policy. “Anything I can do?” asks Phyllis, in a brazen come-on voice. “I’d hate to think of you having a smashed fender or something when you’re not … fully covered,” Walter smirks, almost laughing.

  She’s been taking a sunbath, she says. “No pigeons around, I hope,” says Walter. To his credit, MacMurray’s face falls a bit, as if Walter is embarrassed after saying this, and MacMurray’s gesture is a good way of dealing with such a gross Wilder joke. Wilder himself said he used to taunt the puritanical Chandler with tales of his lively sex life, and there were women who responded to his brand of ribaldry, which is such a thin veil for contempt. These women must have said Wilder was “so funny,” but humor comes from good places and bad places, and Wilder’s humor is from a particularly bad taste neighborhood, one where you’re probably going to get your gentler sensibilities mugged.

  We see Phyllis’s cheap shoes as she walks down the stairs; they have pom-poms on the toes, like something Joan Crawford would have worn in the early thirties (Wilder sets his tale in 1938 to explain why Neff isn’t in the army). Walter makes a dumb joke about The Philadelphia Story (1940), and Phyllis, who has been applying lipstick in a mirror, snaps the lipstick shut to show her impatience with him. She sits down and crosses her shapely legs so he can see her anklet; he notices it, which was her intent, and she uncrosses her legs. When he talks about insurance, Phyllis paces back and forth, and we can see her weighing things in her mind, nervously.

  It’s never made terribly clear whether her nervousness in these first scenes is partly real or entirely feigned. Writer Nick Davis sees Stanwyck’s “first sequence of coaxing Walter Neff into her murderous stratagems not as the first, purposefully amateur stage of a larger plot but as an imperfectly managed ploy; she doesn’t harden or elevate Phyllis into a diabolical genius, but presents her as a woman who unmistakably dislikes her husband and dislikes her step-daughter.” The Phyllis we see initially, Davis writes, has to work at being a monster. I think that Stanwyck is trying to complicate Phyllis in these first scenes, since she knows that the plot is going to box her tightly as a villain later on (it should be remembered that Stanwyck always learned the whole script and made a point of keeping the entire thing in her head at all times).

  There’s no doubt, though, about what she’s doing in the famous fore-play dialogue that ends this first encounter, a scene that has been so endlessly excerpted on TV that it’s tattooed on most of our brains. Its dialogue almost plays like a vaudeville patter routine. That tone might just be a clue to Stanwyck’s basic approach to this part and this movie. Did the specter of career vaudevillian Frank Fay raise its ugly head in her mind while she was playing this woman who loathes her husband and wants him dead? She observed Fay’s routines on stage during her formative years, and in 1933 she even sank her own money into a Fay revue, Tattle Tales, which marked the last time, regrettably, that Stanwyck acted on stage (she did scenes from her Capra films). Add a dash of Wilder’s Weimar vinegar to this Fay training, and here it is:

  “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour,” says Phyllis, very fast, almost as if she’s waiting for the next “Who’s on first?” line. “How fast was I going, Officer?” parries Neff, the salesman incarnate. “I’d say around ninety,” she says, with a lower inflection—heated, but a parody of “heated,” too. “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket,” raps out Neff, quick as a shot. “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” says Phyllis, suddenly a dominatrix. “Suppose it doesn’t take,” he continues (hit me harder, Mistress!). “Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles,” she purrs (Production Code? What Production Code?). “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” he ponders, a canny masochist. “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder,” she snaps, just like she impatiently closed her lipstick in front of the mirror. “That tears it,” he concludes, and the operative word here is “tears.” Wilder is at his best when he turns his wordsmith glee to slang terms, the gaudier and more disposable the better. Phyllis has completely emasculated this man in one rapid-fire exchange, and he loves it. But she’s weary of her own power, a feeling which maybe reads as the uncertainty we sometimes see in her eyes and in her movements.

  Many later critics, most notably Parker Tyler, have seen Wilder’s Double Indemnity as a love story between two men, MacMurray’s Walter and Edward G. Robinson’s Keyes. This feeling is made explicit in Wilder’s dialogue. Walter tells Keyes he loves him several times, always sincerely, though there’s no question that it’s the love of a son for a father. Keyes, on the other hand, does seem to have the hots for Walter, subconsciously; he’s always putting his hands on Walter’s shoulders, and he jealously stays in the room when Walter takes a call from Phyllis. Walter lies to Keyes, says the call is from a girl named Margie, and Keyes says, twice, that he thinks that this Margie “drinks straight from the bottle.” Keyes also lets us know about his one-time brush with matrimony. The “little man” that lives in his gut told him that something was crooked about his bride-to-be, and so he had her investigated and found out that she was a tramp on the take, so he feels justified in shutting women out of his life.

  “You’re not smarter, Walter, you’re just a little taller,” says Keyes, using this crack as an excuse to look Neff up and down, and he keeps saying he’s going to tie up cases and wrap them in tissue paper with little pink ribbons on it. Keyes’s life is mainly his job as an insurance investigator—all of his emotions run to Walter, who’s deeply involved in Keyes’s beloved line of work. Wilder, who knew his Freud, has Walter always lighting Keyes’s cigars for him. Our wise guy director was hip to the fact that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes it symbolizes something else entirely. Thus, Keyes is a repository for Wilder’s ill-concealed misogyny, and also provides Wilder with the framework for a naughty boy sketch of a repressed gay romance.

  In her second scene, Stanwyck plays Phyllis just as nervously as she did before going into the “speed limit” patter. This is a telling choice because practically all of her other characters are seasoned manipulators—unless Stanwyck means here to suggest that Phyllis is such an evil genius that her feigned uncertainty is so expert that it looks real (this is a highly tricky area Stanwyck is operating in, a kind of actor’s shell game to keep us as off-balance as her dupe, Walter). Phyllis reveals that she’s a native Californian, “born and raised in Los Angeles.” Many writers have commented that Phyllis obviously hates Los Angeles, but the way Stanwyck plays this line doesn’t really read that way to me. When she says “born and raised in Los Angeles,” her eyes gleam in an uncontrolled manner, like a little girl trying to please her daddy. They could be gleaming with hate, but it looks like pleasure, too. Then again, as we soon learn, Phyllis Dietrichson has a twisted relationship with pleasure, and this relationship is what makes the performance so modern, so much a leap forward from Cai
n’s vivid but finally rather cardboard boogie-man tootsie.

  Speaking of her husband, Phyllis says, “Sometime we sit here all evening and never say a word to each other.” Stanwyck uses that flat, foggy Brooklyn tone in which “other” becomes “oth-uh,” and it’s hard to decide if the sound is Claudette Colbert classy or Susan Hayward guttural. It’s really somewhere in between, in that grey, indeterminate area where Stanwyck creates and disturbs our expectations. No doubt Phyllis does spend empty evenings like this with her husband, but she isn’t providing us with a real glimpse of her life; it’s an act for Walter. At bottom, this Phyllis is the kind of sociopath who can’t feel anything about anything except her own sick urges, and so Stanwyck empties out her arsenal of man-manipulation and comes up with this unsettlingly artificial mantrap, a kind of void, no soul inside. Phyllis lives in her head and in front of her mirror, and the rest is just show for the shadows surrounding her.

  Stanwyck’s face is made up so heavily that the effect is as unflattering as the Rumpelstiltskin gold of that wig, but Wilder allows her a white sweater so tight you can see her bra underneath it for the clincher seduction scene in Walter’s apartment. This contrast of bad wig and revealing sweater makes her an angel of death under electric light outside his door, a creature of Los Angeles. When he wishes he had something fancy to give her to drink, she says, “Bourbon is fine, Walter,” in a tired but grateful voice. Phyllis likes sex, and she hasn’t been getting much of it at home; she might even be going without entirely (and Stanwyck could probably relate to this).

  Mixing their drinks, Walter talks about some women who didn’t get away with murdering their husbands, and as he does, Wilder gives Stanwyck a close-up where she unveils the monster Phyllis, obsessed by her own preoccupations—not a leopard, as in the Cain book, but a human animal that needs to go back to the warehouse, or the nuthouse, for repairs. As with Stella Dallas, Stanwyck takes the basic material of this character and deepens it. She brought a needed human dimension, among many other things, to Stella, and she also brings this dimension to Phyllis, but she’s wrestling a tougher demon here. We can trust that Stanwyck knows exactly what she’s doing, but she’s never going to show you all her cards in this movie.

  Walter talks about a woman who was executed for the murder of her husband. Lost in her fantasies, Phyllis says, “Perhaps it was worth it to her.” Stanwyck’s voice here is sensible, hushed, but uncommonly forceful; she’s been saving this voice for the moment when it will scare us most. After this, though, Stanwyck gives us a few clues to what might really be happening inside Phyllis. When Walter suggests she divorce her husband, she says, “He wouldn’t give me a divorce,” in a fast, irritated tone that sounds like Phyllis is totally sure on this one point. Mr. Diet-richson beefs about her buying things; he had money when he married her, but that has dwindled. “And I wanted a home,” Phyllis sneers, disgusted at her own momentary weakness (this, too, sounds genuine).

  She was the nurse for Dietrichson’s first wife, and she says she pitied him after the wife died. During those empty nights when they say nothing—or not much—to each other, Phyllis must always be returning to her fantasies of killing him, for we see her doing so in Walter’s apartment with a diseased kind of Robert Ryan-like pride in her plans. “Walter, I don’t want to kill him, I never did,” she claims, so unconvincingly as to be ridiculous, but then she turns the screws on her victim by admitting, “Not even when he gets drunk and slaps my face.” She says this in a slightly agitated voice that lets us know that this dominatrix doesn’t mind switching to masochism every now and then (here, too, unavoidably, is a reminder of the drunk, abusive Frank Fay slapping Stanwyck’s face in public, at Hollywood nightclubs—for an audience).

  Phyllis says she’s thought of leaving her drunk husband in the car with the motor still running and closing the garage door, like Bette Davis in Bordertown (1935) or Ida Lupino in They Drive By Night (1940). Phyllis is obscenely excited by the idea of this murder, and her excitement is sexual, so that Stanwyck is actually closer, at times, to Cain’s Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, wanting to rut with her new man practically on the corpse of her dead husband.

  Walter puts his large hand on Phyllis’s white sweater and the camera pulls discreetly back; his voiceover says that she shed some light tears. When we get back to them in that room, they’ve definitely had sex, and it was probably pretty good in its animal way. Walter says yes, they’ll kill her husband. Phyllis gets up off the couch, her face registering, “OK, it worked,” but also a bit of nervousness; she isn’t facing Walter at this moment, so this nervousness of hers is at least partly real. So many of Stanwyck’s performances are about the almost non-existent dividing line between acting an emotion and really feeling it. She knew that the body and even the mind can’t really know when you’re “acting,” which is why acting can be such a dangerous and depleting profession, an art form based on tricking yourself so convincingly that the “tricks” often dissolve, and what’s left are real tears and real anger—even real happiness—on top of something troublingly hollowed-out.

  We meet Dietrichson (Tom Powers), and he does seem like a crab, to say the least. He still treats Phyllis like an employee rather than a wife. Alfred Hitchcock often employed the same technique as Wilder uses here, getting us to identify with a would-be murderer and then confronting us with the moral implications of our identification. Wilder isn’t making this picture to ponder questions of ethics, of course. He just wants to put on a good, “different” show and entertain an audience with depravity and its consequences, but Stanwyck is stalking bigger game.

  When Walter insists to Phyllis that Mr. Dietrichson needs to die in a train accident in order for her to get a doubled insurance payout, Stanwyck makes Phyllis seem tickled by his enthusiasm, almost touched. She looks at him for a moment as if to say, “Wait a minute … are you my soulmate or something?” She does love Walter, in her way, while they’re planning the murder and shortly afterwards, because he’s made her fantasy real, and he seems like such an ideal partner that she can barely contain her admiring surprise at his resourcefulness.

  When they meet at a supermarket to discuss their game plan, Phyllis bites her lip a bit to show that she’s nervous, but she completely drops this act when Walter leaves her. The camera catches the monster Phyllis again, peering out like some hungry beast from behind boxes of food. Walter mentions that from now on it’s “straight down the line” for both of them, and the monomaniacal Phyllis becomes obsessed with this phrase, repeating it, with variations, for the rest of the film, like a sinister mantra. Leading her husband to his car, she mockingly calls him “honey,” and when he mentions coming back from his class reunion, Phyllis’s mouth purses slightly, as if she’s thinking, “You won’t be back, buster.” She stops the car and honks the horn, which is Walter’s cue to strangle the husband. As he does this, Wilder gives Stanwyck a justly famous close-up to show how Phyllis reacts.

  At first her mouth is open, excitedly, but then it closes again, tightly. In her eyes, there’s a nearly unreadable look. It is at once childlike and sad, and there’s a bit of self-recognition and a bit of satisfaction—and a bit of disappointment that the whole job is over, for she had so enjoyed the planning. “What comes next?” she seems to think, with the melancholy of a serial killer who knows that they can only really get off every once in a great while. There’s even some joy in her face. So many things are blended together in this close-up that it has the visual effect of a full orchestra playing at full blast—probably something by Mahler.

  Stanwyck takes you through every gradation of what a sociopath like Phyllis feels. Just how did she do this? It took craft, of course, and planning. I can only hope that she killed off Frank Fay in her head, and maybe Al Jolson—and every other man who did her dirt. But she needed to make a large imaginative leap here, too; anyone is capable of murder, if provoked, but some rare people need no prompting. Phyllis wants the money, as does Walter, but that’s not why she does this,
ultimately; she does it to satisfy urges that no animal has. She is the embodiment of a human plague, and it comes to us during the middle of a world war that would leave us with no illusions about the depths of human evil. Many of Wilder’s relatives perished in concentration camps, and it doesn’t take much thought to put a Phyllis in that context, a Maria Mandel of LA.

  Wilder added a suspenseful scene, where their car doesn’t start right away after Walter stages Dietrichson’s death on the train. He makes another inspired addition when he has Keyes and Phyllis almost collide in Walter’s hallway, with her perilously hidden behind a door. (Cain said afterwards that he wished he had thought of such a scene, yet it’s purely a movie scene because, uncharacteristically, Wilder has thought it through in solely visual terms). The bits with Dietrichson’s daughter Lola don’t work too well, mainly because the actress playing this girl, Jean Heather, isn’t as appealing as she needs to be, but we do learn from her that Phyllis did kill the first Mrs. Dietrichson (there are no murdered children in the Wilder version, which even he probably felt was a bit much).

  Lola says that she saw Phyllis in front of the mirror, trying on mourning attire: “There was a look in her eye … I’ll never forget,” she adds. We know that look all too well. In the grocery store again, with sunglasses pressed into her wig, Phyllis talks like a zombie as she keeps Walter tethered to her. Then she takes off the glasses so that we see her overloaded, bleary eyes before she zaps him with an enslaving look and takes her leave. It’s like a bump and grind, and then a move back behind the curtain.