Expertly adapted from James M. Cain’s novel, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity ranks among American cinema’s best films noir. The patrician Charles Brackett, Wilder’s longtime co-writer during the 1930s and ’40s, considered the book too seamy and downmarket for his tastes, so the director recruited another master of hardboiled crime fiction, Raymond Chandler, to collaborate with him on the script. Although Wilder and Chandler ended up detesting one another, the film superbly combined their talents with its bleakly cynical worldview and floridly colloquial dialogue. Entranced by prototypical femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (a mesmerizing Barbara Stanwyck), policy salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray, who’s wonderfully cast against his good-guy type) helps to dispatch her churlish husband and secure a fat insurance payout in what appears a perfect crime. But the persistent sleuthing of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson in a delightfully hyperactive performance), the ever-skeptical claims manager at Neff’s firm, threatens to upend the would-be couple’s plans.

“A first-rate murder thriller… the best thing of its kind since The Maltese Falcon.” — The New York Times

“One of the most definitive studies of crime and punishment in the American cinema, and perhaps the finest example of film noir.” — The New Yorker

This presentation is part of the film & lectures series Wilder Times in partnership with St. Louis Oasis. Thursday matinees for six of the films: Double Indemnity (July 9), Sunset Boulevard (Aug. 13), Ace in the Hole (Sept. 10), Some Like It Hot (Oct. 8), The Apartment (Nov. 19), and One, Two, Three (Dec. 10) will be followed by a discussion of 30 minutes led by Cliff Froehlich, retired executive director of Cinema St. Louis and former film critic for The Riverfront Times.