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Street near NefTs apt. house,” where the story’s protagonist takes a walk fol-lowing the murder. Embedded in NefTs voice-over is the film’s inevitably fatal morał retribution: “That was all there was to it. Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked, there was nothing to give us away.” But there is growing paranoia: “And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the Street to the drug storę, suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it’s true, so help me: I couldn’t hear my own foot-steps. It was the walk of a dedd man.”³³ NefTs personal confession to Keyes by dictating the story’s narration also adds an intimate male-bonding ca-maradęric that would have appealed to men in military units. Cain praised the film’s narration and flashback structure. “It’s the only picture madę ffom my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of.” The “device of letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machinę” was “much better than my ending... I would have done it if I had thought of it.”³⁴

Because censors “exercised morę power while films were in the planning stages than in the review of completed features,”³⁵ once Chandler and Wilder’s script was approved by Breen and the footage already shot, Double Indemnity was basically finished. Wilder could film the images any way he wanted to, keeping within the approved dialogue and action of the script; he was thus free to be creative with lighting, photography, and sound to evoke a dark, seedy milieu rife with dark themes and malicious deeds—with the exception of one particularly infamous sequence. According to Para-mount production files Wilder devised the film’s ending after the PCA ob-jected to the narrative payoff in Cain’s original story. Breen was scandalized that the novel allowed the criminals to flee the country with no retribution for their crime—with the aid of the insurance agent—then ended in the couple’s suicide instead of their apprehension by the authorities. In an ef-fort to comply with these Codę objections Wilder shot a seąuence detailing the criminals execution in a gas chamber (for which he spent $4,695 on the set alone);³⁶ that ending was shelved after the film’s preview—and after the PCA determined the “whole sequence in the death chamber to be very ques-tionable in its present form ... specifically the details of the execution ... are unduly gruesome to the Codę.”³⁷ In the finał ending, like a war film, Neff lies dying as Keyes lights his cigarette, waiting for the police to arrive.

The Codę restricted specific references to sex and violence—these were to be implied rather than shown. Omitting direct references to sex and vi-olence capitalized on innuendo in dialogue (a clever fusion of hard-boiled Chandleresque style with Wilders black comedic wit) and the dark, seduc-tive visual design. Sordidly suggestive and definitively noir, the “black” film showcased the splintering yenetian blinds, pronounced shadow, and chiaro-

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scuro low-key mise-en-scćne of Billy Wilder’s direction, Hans Dfeier and Hal Pereira’s art direction, and cinematographer John Seitz’s>stark news-reel-style camerawork. The dark photography created a corrupt, mysterious setting that undermined those censorship restrictions that were followed. Wilder used many striking images, such as the pitch-black night-for-night exterior shots of the railroad tracks where Neff and Phyllis drop her hus-band’s body after they murder him in the car. The deep blackness surround-ing the sedan (with headlights off) suggested a murderous milieu as the en-gine fails in the dark. The completely black exterior of the neighborhood Street seemed to visually swallow Neff as he walks home (unable to hear his own footsteps) after the murder. In fact, Wilder’s film was suspenseful and unsettling from the moment it opened as Neff, shot (by Phyllis just prior to murdering her) and bleeding, swerves his car, screeching through dark, wet city streets in this black urban environment. To avoid showing censored vi-olence and sex, the film suggested action offscreen, using sound and visu-als to convey taboo materiał in an unseen space. For example, Wilder framed a tight close-up of Phyllis’s reaction to her husband’s murder (as the horn blows and Neff strangles him offscreen) to imply violence rather than show any details of the crime. Viewers could use their imagination to fili in the void. Wilder’s clever devices included seating the couple at oppo-site ends of a couch in Neff’s apartment, fully dressed and smoking ciga-rettes, after fading from a passionate embrace to imply sex, splintered by venetian blind shadows to forebode their fatally doomed affair. These cin-ematic elements added sultry eroticism and a dark, ominous setting.

The chiaroscuro lighting and shadowy visual design that tbday is con-sidered so characteristic of film noir style was in large measure a sawy aes-thetic response to the Codę and the war. The quintessential noir images in Double Indemnity effectively utilized its mise-en-scćne to reveal the corrupt American city; its sordidness is suggested by scenes shrouded in shadow, fog, and smoke and by light splintered into oblique patterns or glistening reflections on rain-ślicked streets, pools of water, shattered Windows, and mirrored surfaces. Cinematographer John Seitz acknowledges the influence of the war on the visual technique of Double Indemnity: “The film was shot in ‘newsreel style.’ We attempted to keep it extremely realistic... The effect of waning sunlight” was created by using “some silver dust mixed with smoke” to accentuate the shimmering contrast of low-key lighting.³⁸ Hollywood^ new trend toward realism as an outgrowth of the war influenced both fictional and documentary films during 1943 to 1945. Wilder noted that in filming Double Indemnity with director of photography Seitz, “We had to be very realistic. You had to believe the situation and the characters, or