censorship, (2)

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interested. According to Cain, after Breen rejected MGM’s 1935 submission of Double Indemnity, Johnson “tried to devise a method of meeting this ob-jection.” Breen actually approved Johnson’s version (with an outline treat-ment by Colonel Joy). As Cain explains, however, 2oth Century-Fox’s head of production, Darryl Zanuck, preferred the original version and said Johnson^ “was not the same story.”¹² Zanuck, who had recently left the socially conscious environment of Warner Bros., was interested in the darkness of Cain’s story in 1935, but without Breen’s endorsement of the original prem-ise, according to PCA records and Cain’s 1944 interview, the Double Indemnity project sank into limbo for eight years.

In the meantime Cain sold the story in 1936 to Liberty magazine as a serial, where it received an enthusiastic reception. Its popularity led to its pub-lication in the collection Three of a Kind on April 19,1943. With the novella about to appear, Cain’s agent recirculated advance copies of Double Indemnity to the studios. Paramount became interested at the behest of Billy Wilder, who, according to Cain, “had his eye on it for some tiipe.”¹³ Wilder admitted producer Joseph Sistrom “had read the story and had brought it to the attention of the studio and to my attention ... He was the producer, but they only wanted to give him associate producer credit and he refused it; he didnt want to take any credit at all.”¹⁴ The New York Times noted Sistrom’s interest in the project after his secretary disappeared into the ladies’ room, reading Double Indemnity and then insisting that Cain’s “sen-sational” story was perfect for Billy Wilder.¹⁵ All were keen on taking a crack at Cain’s juicy tale.

With interest at Paramount, the story was resubmitted to the Hays Office, whose first response was identical to the 1935 verdict. Indeed, Breen’s letter to Luigi Luraschi of Paramount’s Censorship Department on March 15,1943, was a word-for-word duplicate of the October 10,1935, letter he had sent to MGM’s Mayer—and other studios—banning Cains story.¹⁶ (Per-haps Breen thought the studios suffered from memory loss, or possibly he did not think anyone else kept files for eight years.) This time, though, Cain was given a copy of the memo: “It was perhaps as stupid a document as I ever read—for it madę not the slightest effort to ascertain whether the pic-ture could be filmed with the changes commonly madę in a novel when it is prepared for the screen ... But Wilder, [Paramount executive William] Dozier and Sistrom are not easily frightened men, and they decided to make a try at it.”¹⁷ After a lapse in correspondence Luraschi responded to Breens letter by submitting a partial story outline for Double Indemnity on Sep-tember 21,1943.¹⁸

As Cain described his story, “it is about a married woman who falls in

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love with another man, kills her husband, fraudulently attempts to collect insurance, attempts to kill her lover and gets killed by him for selfish mo-tives.” However, it “presents these people with compassion and understand-ing.”¹⁹ On September 24,1943, Breen replied to Luraschi’s submission: “the basie story seems to meet the requirements of the Production Codę.” Breen gave very specific restrictions in response to two scenes in the story outline: Phyllis’s erotic entrance and the murder of her husband while she is driv-ing him to the train station:

page 6 The towel must properly cover Phyllis ... below the knees with no unacceptable exposure.

page 8 The flimsy house pajamas must be adequate. page 43 Omit “And listen don’t handle the policy without putting your gloveson.”

page 47 Omit “to park your South end

page 62 Omit details on disposing of the corpse and explicit details of the crime... delete the whole scene/sequence ... therefore, Fade out after they take the body from the car—let the dia-logue explain what they did.

page 74 Delete specific poisons in [insurance investigator] Keye’s speech sentences.

Breen added that he would be “happy to read your shooting script and report further ... finał judgment is based on the finished picture.” Breen and Paramount’s Censorship Department would exchange twenty-three letters with revised pages between September 24 and December l, 1943. Many se-quences were written in pieces as production progressed, then submitted for PCA approval, and quickly shot—Wilder madę minor changes (pertain-ing to “displays of the body”), and Breen approved them. Wilder complied with most of Breen’s requests—with the exception of Phyllis’s towel not be-ing “below the knees.”²⁰

Not surprisingly, Breens lifting of the PCA ban did not come soon enough for Cain. David Hanna’s February 1944 article, “Hays Censors Rile Jim Cain,” noted the hard-boiled author’s “high indignation about the manhandling his books received ffom the Hays guardians of cinematic virtue” and the “tortu-ous path” Double Indemnity traveled in its transition to the screen:

What about the ban on my other stories? For example, The Postman Always Rings Twice, still gathering dust at MGM, which could be a fine movie if handled as adroitly as Double Indemnity. What about Mildred