Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

hometowns and move into bigger cities, like Los Angeles, and ending up forced into the
world of crime or turning to violence. To some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Cain was the
central figure of the “poets of tabloid murder”; he writes that “Cain himself is particularly
ingenious in tracing from their first beginnings the tangles that gradually tighten around the
necks of the people involved in those bizarre and brutal crimes that figure in the American
papers” (Wilson 1962:21).
Cain’s stories - in which normally a man falls for a woman (the already-mentioned
femme fatale) and becomes involved in a crime with her and is eventually betrayed by her
– relate to the manner illicit sex is in fact a trap leading quickly to crime as the new lovers
plan to murder the woman’s inconvenient husband. Double Indemnity served as the basis
for one of the most talismanic films noirs. Sex and lust, greed and murder, the first-person
narration, the recurrent flashbacks are all elements that anticipate other important films
noirs such as Out of the Past, The Killers, and Criss Cross. However, film adaptation of
Cain’s novels followed a different pattern. One has to remember that Double Indemnity,
for example, was screenwritten by Chandler, and both he and director Wilder raised the
level of the whole social context, making the sex scenes less evident, and also making sure
that the dialogues were not so blunt. William Robertson also underlines these differences
in the film adaptation:
Cain was many things (…). He relied on his rhythmic sense of dialogue and his
understanding of human psychology and social context to tell his tales. So it was
that when film noir took on the job of adapting Cain’s novels, the distinctly 1930s
aspects were removed from his yarns of sex and murder, and manipulative,
castrating temptresses. The result was that Cain’s strong but flawed women lost
whatever motivating traits they exhibited in the books and became pointlessly
manipulative. (…) It’s important, and only fair, to remember the distinction
between the literary demands of the 1930s and the cinematic demands of the
1940s. (…) If nothing else, Cain deserves to be taken seriously for his legitimate
contribution to American literature. (Robertson 2001:27)
Double Indemnity, filmed in 1944, became Billy Wilder’s first and truest film noir.
The plot is very simple: insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is tempted by
the attractive Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the wife of his client, into cooking
up a brilliant scheme to murder her husband and collect on his accident insurance policy,
with a double indemnity clause.
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