censorship, (6)

io8

Blackout

all was lost... Double Indemnity was based on the principal of M... I tried for a very realistic picture—a few little tricks, but not very tricky. M was the look ... It was a picture that looked like a newsreel. You never realized it was staged. But like a newsreel, you look to grab the moment of truth, and exploit it.” Room interiors were shot in art director Hans Dreier’s house, and Wilder described the image he wanted to achieve: “whenever I opened the door and the sun was coming in, there was always dust in the air. Be-cause they [femme fatale Phyllis and her husband] never dusted it.” Wilder insisted realism influenced the visual style of Double Indemnity even morę than earlier German expressionist films. “There was some dramatic light-ing, yes, but it was newsreel lighting. That was ideał. I’m not saying that every shot was a masterpiece, but sometimes even in a newsreel you get a masterpiece shot. That was the approach. No phoney setups ... Everything was meant to support the realism of the story.”³⁹

The war played a key role in Wilders bleak vision of authenticity. Shortly before directing and coscripting Double Indemnity, Wilder directed the World War II desert combat drama Five Graves to Cairo (1943) while actual fighting was still going on in Africa. Wilder noted, “In serious films like Five Graves, Double Indemnity, and The Lost Weekend I strove for a stronger sense of realism in the settings in order to match the kind of story we were telling. I wanted to get away from what we described in those days as the white satin decor associated with MGM’s chief set designer, Cedric Gibbons.” Wilder recalled, “Once the set was ready for shooting on Double Indemnity... I would go around and overturn a few ashtrays in order to give the house in which Phyllis lived an appropriately grubby look because she was not much of a housekeeper. I worked with the cameraman to get dust into the air to give the house a sort of musty look. We blew illuminant particles into the air and when they floated down into a shaft of light it looked just like dust.” He added, “Shortly afterwards MGM madę another James M. Cain novel into a picture, The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Lana Turner as the wife of a proprietor of a hot dog stand. She was madę up to look glamorous instead of slightly tarnished the way we madę up Barbara Stanwyck for Double Indemnity and I think Postman was less authentic as a result.”⁴⁰ Cain’s journalistic background informed his style; the gritty nonfiction source of his story was derived from newspaper headlines—not unlike the realistic* newsreel style of documentary films being produced during the war. Hard-hitting materiał began changing the cultural and production cli-mate during the 1940S to accommodate serious topics that posed challenges to the Codę. A July 30,1944, New York Times article, written just prior to the release of Double Indemnity, projects greater popularity of documentary

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subjects related to the war and “increasing use of documentary methods in the telling of screen fictional dramas.”⁴¹ The wartime trend toward newsreel style inflected a visually and thematically dark film in Double Indemnity.

Double Indemnity was truły a breakthrough film in definitively inaugu-rating this sophisticated wartime noir strategy as a means of c[oaking illicit materiał while it disguised cheap or recycled sets to accommodate the wartime restrictions on production. On October 6,1943—ten days into shooting—a Paramount memo from Norman Lacey to Frank Caffey noted that “existing dimout regulations will not permit such use of light” during three night-location shoots scheduled at the Union Pacific East Los Angeles and Glendale train stations.⁴² Several memos referred to these dimout restrictions—in fact, the crew actually considered renting Santa Fe railcars and filming the train seąuence in Las Vegas. (They finally were allowed to film in Los Angeles and Glendale at night using very little light.) Such restrictions contributed to the film’s definitive noir style. For example, Cains story reads: “There’s nothing so dark as a railroad track in the middle of the night.”⁴³ The lighting restrictions actually aided in creating such an ambi-ence. The car’s headlights are turned off in this scene—the script notes a “dark landscape” at the railroad tracks where the lights of the sedan’s “dark bulk... blink twice and go out.”⁴⁴ The film’s visual rendering of Cain’s materiał not only establishes a model for the dark, cynical thematics and style of film noir but also achieves this amid—and because of—industrial wartime production restrictions.

The wartime environment and its production constraints directly contributed to the psychological paranoia and claustrophobia of Wilder’s film noir. As wartime dimout restrictions enhanced the films dark style and ju-dicious use of lighting, a Paramount production memo for Double Indemnity shows that the studio hired “plainclothes detectives and OPA [Office of Price Administration] officials” to patrol the shoot at the market. The studio wanted to prevent theft of grocery items by the cast and crew dur-ing filming, a likely possibility due to wartime rationing. Thus Paramount provided a materiał base of embedded paranoia into the actual production of the film. Ironically these production circumstances inform the scene’s clandestine rendezvous at this seemingly mundane site following the mur-der. Moreover, these rationed grocery items were used to accentuate the cluttered claustrophobia of the market’s interior mise-en-scfene, suggesting the paranoid criminal couple’s physical and morał entrapment; they’ll not evade the law.⁴⁵

Wilder had tremendous influence as a writer-director, with increased creative control and power in getting controversial materiał produced.