Double Indemnity presents a unique challenge for analysis for the modern reader. One of the most familiar pieces of conventional wisdom that also happens to be unusually true more often than not is that “the book was better than the movie.” In certain cases, of course, the reverse is true, but more often than not those cases tend to be limited to those books that just weren’t all that great in the first place. For instance, Peter Benchley’s Jaws is certainly a fun read, but as literature it is most assuredly lacking. For that reason alone, one has few compunctions about asserting that Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation improved upon its source material. But then there are those special and truly rare cases when a movie that is almost universally judged to be better than the book is being compared to a book that enjoys a rather high reputation itself.
Such is the case with James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. The film adaptation directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Wilder and Cain’s fellow legend in hard-boiled crime fiction, Raymond Chandler, essentially codified the template for a genre which would dominate crime films for the next decade: film noir. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Double Indemnity would on the day after the Oscar ceremony for that year snuggle firmly into its position as the poster boy for everything wrong with the Academy Awards. Arguably deserving of at least six of its awards—not to mention a win in a category in which it was not even nominated, Best Actor—today one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who agreed with Oscar voters that night who failed to honor the film with even one win. Double Indemnity has become—by any measurement of the term—a legendary classic.
James M. Cain’s novel does not enjoy quite the elevated and universal respect among literary critics as Wilder’s film enjoys among movie aficionados, but it is hardly considered worthless pulp fiction. Initially criticized for what seemed to be merely a reworking of the same plot of the novel which brought Cain to the public attention—The Postman Always Rings Twice—this follow-up which appeared two years later has since gone on to eclipse that novel in terms of critical respect. While most critics would argue that Mildred Pierce is Cain’s most completely successful novel, Double Indemnity is of such quality that a good argument might be made that had the film version not become so legendary, Cain’s novel might be even more respected.
In truth, there is very little difference between the novel and film. Some changes were altered in order to meet strict censorship rules in place at the time, but for the most part the narrative follows along the same trajectory in both media. (For some reason, the last names of the two major characters were change for no obviously apparent reason.) Two major points of departure will be noted and neither was deemed necessary in order to please the board of censors. Firstly, the Phyllis in the novel is associated with more murders before that of her husband than she is associated with the film. The Phyllis in the novel is a sociopathic killer with obviously quite serious mental problems in comparison to the simply larcenous Phyllis who kills for reasons of upward mobility and financial independence.
The second major departure from the original source is the point at which one can identify what makes the film significantly better than the book. The strength and power of Cain’s novel—and what really sets it apart from The Postman Always Rings Twice—is the irony of identity. Even Phyllis admits her husband isn’t really bad to her so it’s not as if she is killing out of self-defense. She just wants the money. And her accomplice Walter is very good at what he does for a living: the admirable if rather boring middle class of selling insurance. These two are hardly thugs, but more importantly they do not even rise above thuggery to the level of working class stiffs and drifters like their counterparts in the earlier novel. Even their names seem as far removed from sociopathy and killing for money as possible: Phyllis and Walter as opposed to the earlier Cora and Frank. It is much easier to picture a Cora and Frank killing a Mr. Papadakis in a murder fueled by sexual passion than it is to picture a Phyllis and Walter carefully planning out a complicated murder plot that is also a plot to defraud an insurance involving faking the falling off a train by a Mr. Nirdlinger. (Okay, maybe the reason for changing the last name of Phyllis is obvious and apparent.)
The point being that Walter and Phyllis—despite the obvious mental problems facing Phyllis—are situated from the very first page as the most unlikely pair of killers in American fiction to that point. A drifter and a woman trapped in a marriage with an older, cruder immigrant? Sure, one can imagine that pretty easily even if they don’t necessarily fit he preconceived image of the criminal type. But Walter sells insurance, and Phyllis is a pretty 32-year-old blonde living in a nice house with a nice enough husband and no real pressing need for an insurance payout. These two are so normal from the outside as to be almost boring and predictable and that sense of predictable makes it so easy to buy the film’s ending that they each sell each other out and in another fit of impulsive passion become each other’s executioner. The ending is believable but also neat and tidy. It just feels right.
Cain’s solution, by contrast, feels just so wrong. The criminality expands beyond the couple at the center to encompass the insurance company that engages in questionable ethics and motivations to avoid the bad publicity of a trial. The result is a highly manipulative effort on the part of Walter’s boss, Keyes, to arrange for two killers and lovers to wind up on a ship with the knowledge that they are being pursued. Their last final act of doubled passion is to make the pact to jump overboard and allow the actual shark in the water to feast on their flesh much like these metaphorical sharks feasted on the flesh of Mr. Nirdlinger and the insurance company they defrauded.
This ending threatens to undo the very strength of everything that has come before. The final pages of Walter’s confession suddenly sounds artsy and literary instead of sounding like the intelligent, but thuddingly average Joe he’s been up to that point. And while Phyllis on the whole acts fairly normal herself, she reverts to a behavior mentioned only once before and from a not entirely reliable witness at that. Ultimately, Cain’s novel suffers in comparison to the film adaptation because it doesn’t carry through on the strength of its conviction. Cain starts and then carefully constructs upon that foundation a story that is driven precisely by the fact that his two sociopaths could be the reader’s neighbor or co-worker. But at the end, suddenly he wants to inject a tragic dimension to them that not only doesn’t exist, but shouldn’t exist. Until those final pages, however, Cain’s novel is every bit the equal of the truly legendary film adaptation it inspired.
