Wilder managed to create one of the most iconic cinematic entries of the noir genre, with the inestimable help by legendary scribe Raymond Chandler (who collaborated with Wilder on translating Cain’s novel into an incendiary screen script for which he received an Academy Award nomination.) In contrast, in the film he’s made out to be a man who feels disappointed with his humdrum work, morally cracking, and only in hindsight he sees he should not have gotten involved with Phyllis Dietrichson. Walter in the book is portrayed as a man who is already a criminal by inclination and an acute sociopath. Double Indemnity was filmed in 1944, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Cain wrote the emblematic novel Double Indemnity, which was published in 1943 in the volume Three of a Kind (the story originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine in 1936). Cain’s character Walter Huff reflects on his crimes in the classic arc of the Double Indemnity novel. I got to laughing, a hysterical cackle, there in the dark.” -James M. She had used me for a cat’s paw so she could have another man, and she had enough on me to hang me higher than a kite. The woman was a killer, out-and-out, and she had made a fool of me. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. “I stared into the darkness some more that night.
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