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Rating: "I killed him for money and for a woman. And I didn't get the money. And I didn't get the woman. Great deal."
This is the bitter initial realization of the protagonist of this masterful film from '44 by the great Wilder. The story is a classic noir: a woman drives an insurance agent, obsessed with her, to kill her husband to collect the insurance payout, and they both end up heading toward ruin.
What the director does here is construct the grammar of noir: first of all, there is the passion that obsesses to the point of killing and the femme fatale played by Barbara Stanwick (famous for these roles), a magnificent dark lady, ambiguous, fascinating, and ruthless in winning over men with her allure (the beautiful costumes worn with an anklet) and manipulating them. Then, the perfect crime that fades due to an inexorable fate.
In the film, there is no love or pity, only an obsession with passion and an avarice for money that the director masterfully shows with perfect shots and dark, smoky, murky settings like the living room always shrouded in shadow and dust and the scorching heat of Los Angeles summers or the night shots of the city (the film indeed mostly takes place at night), like the opening one. Here too, as in Sunset Boulevard, the film speaks with a foretelling that catches us off guard; we already know who the killer is and see this wounded man making a cold and rational assessment, making us follow the events with interest until the end, which returns to the film's initial scene. We already understand that this man is in serious trouble, and then in the first encounter with the woman, her at the top of the stairs, in their glances, a complicity is already sensed that will lead to ruin.
The screenplay is also splendid with the protagonist's voiceover guiding us throughout the film and the perfect dialogues ("the stake was fifty thousand dollars plus a man's life. A man I didn't know but who was married to a woman that didn't love and that I wanted at any cost") and a magnificent use of black and white that immediately fills the film with tension and leads us into a fine psychological game more than a physical one among the three main characters: the two criminal lovers and the detective, also the colleague of the killer. Wilder thus takes a detective film toward a drama and creates one of the finest film noirs.
The screenplay is by Wilder, assisted by the famous noir writer Raymond Chandler, and the music underscores the rising tension. The censorship cut the final scene in which the protagonist’s execution in the gas chamber was foreseen.
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