Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Double Indemnity by James M Cain (1940)

 
‘I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.’

You know how they almost always make shit films out of good books? And just occassionally they make good films out of pretty mediocre books (Jaws and Rosemary’s Baby come to mind).

How often is something both a good book and a good film? Almost never? Nooooo – noir is the exception to that rule - loads of good books crossed over into film really well – just off the top of my head, the Getaway, The Grifters, The Maltese Falcon, the Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, The Third Man… generally when they make a film from a noir book, it’s a good one.

I think it’s cause noir tends to be written in that cool, laconic ’stay on the surface’ style, where characters are revealed only through what they do and what they say – like in a screenplay. None of that interior monologue stuff that novelists like to write but can’t be filmed. None of the atmospherics. Just head on in there and describe specifics. And it can’t hurt that most of the stories feature snappy dialogue and lots of violence.

Double Indemnity is one of the best films ever, and it’s a great book too, with lots of the aforementioned. Walter Huff is an insurance salesman who gets too close to the wife of a client, Phyliss Nirdlinger (love those crazy names) and together they plan to do her husband in. Oh you’ve heard that before? That’s cause this book’s been ripped off a thousand times, it set off a whole mytheme all by itself. But it’s still never been beat for its description of the paranoid nightmare ride taken by murderous lovers.

‘Double Indemnity’ is when your life insurance pays off double for certain unusual circumstances, like falling off a train. But Huff doesn’t even seem that interested in the money: his motives are simply lust for her, and the desire to put one over on his boss by pulling off the perfect crime.

But with grim inevitability, his plan all goes tits up, and the book becomes the literary equivalent of watching a slow motion train wreck: it’s horrible, but you can’t avert your eyes…