Double Indemnity blog

In light of what we spoke about in class, Double Indemnity surely exhibited all the characteristics of crime, drama and of course a film noir.  To begin, you have the beautiful seductive, the “oh, but I can’t…” vulnerable female who manipulates the male and situation to get her ways. No doubt the femme fatale in the story who leads the “good guy”, not true in every story, astray.  Then you have the male, who of course gets seduced and easily manipulated into doing things he probably would have never thought of doing prior to their meeting. Even though in this particular movie he was not portrayed as he was in the book, he was still vulnerable and easily manipulated. In the book he knew all the protocols, rules and regulation, thus making it seem as if he had thought of committing the crime or falsifying documentations prior to Mrs Dietrichson, Phyllis Nirdlinger in the book version, ever bringing it up to him.  Therefore, showing his shadow is greed as well.

As far as generic conventions and contexts, the story begins by with the protagonist telling us the story himself by recording his confession, and so we are captivated to know what occurs since we do know that a crime has been committed.  As the story progresses, we see the plot is this idea of having to commit a crime, due to greed, by making someone vulnerable. This meaning using the femme fatale to manipulate the male protagonist. Similar to how it occurred in Maltese Falcon when the female used the detective to get what she wanted. Both stories led us to believe that the woman were innocent when in fact it differed. I believe that the femme fatale was Mr. Huff in Double Indemnity since he did the killing and he ended up killing Phyllis when she failed to kill him.  She to me was used by him when things did not go as planned for him and ended up turning himself in. Maltese Falcon was the other way around and the female was turned in.

Overall, for me I truly enjoyed watching Double Indemnity.  The narrative and the plot kept me wondering how things will unfold, even though it was predictable. As I stated before I’m not a fan of black and white films but this movie was actually one I enjoyed watching.

 

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