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Double Indemnity is a 1944 film noir. It stars Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. The movie was adapted by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the novella Magazine. It was directed by Wilder. The story was based on a 1927 crime perpetrated by a married Queens woman and her lover. Ruth (Brown) Snyder persuaded her boyfriend to kill her husband, after having her spouse take out a big insurance policy - with a double-indemnity clause. The murderers were quickly identified and arrested. sup

The film tells the story of an insurance salesman (MacMurray) who finds himself entwined in a plot to kill a woman's husband. A tenacious investigator (Robinson) thinks it's foul play and may suspect his co-worker and the recently widowed .

The title of the film is a reference to a frequently-found provision in many life insurance policies in which an amount twice the amount which would normally be paid to the beneficiary becomes payable in the event of the accidental death of the insured. An alternate ending was shot for the film (to appease censors) featuring killer MacMurray going to the gas chamber. This footage is lost but stills of the scene still exist.

Today, the film is considered a classic. Film critic Roger Ebert in his review of the film praise the director Wilder and cinematographer Seitz: "The photography by John F. Seitz helped develop the noir of sharp-edged shadows and shots, strange angles and lonely Edward Hopper settings." A review of the film in the New York Times September 7, 1944 gave the film a negative review. Reviewer Bosley Crowther found Edward G. Robinson's supporting role excellent but also stated "Such folks as delight in murder stories for their academic elegance alone should find this one steadily diverting, despite its monotonous pace and length. Indeed, the fans of James M. Cain's tough fiction might gloat over it with gleaming joy."

The plot is about how a crime is committed and the story is told from the point of view of the criminal. In the case of , the plot is literally told from the point of view of the criminal. The entire plot (except the very first scenes and the very last scenesDouble Indemnity is told in flashback by Walter Neff, who commits murder and very nearly gets away with it., takes a naturalistic view of human nature. This is due in part to the flashback structure of the film. As everything in described by Neff into the dictating machine clearly happened in the past, and there is no way in the present or future to alter events that occurred in the past, it is evident that the events leading up to the eventual execution of Neff were inevitable and were due mostly to Neff’s nature as a weak-willed man in the hands of a Moody lighting including Venetian blind effects on the walls and on characters’ faces in some scenes look like bars on a jail and make the characters of seem as though they are trapped by their human weaknesses and doomed to failure. The cinematographic compositions and the art direction are particularly claustrophobic as well. Characters are often backed into corner where mobility is impossible (such as in cars or telephone booths). was listed at number 38 on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 American films of all time.

It was nominated for Academy Awards for

It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle? Maybe you would have known Keyes the minute she mentioned accident insurance, but I didn't. I felt like a million.