Fred MacMurray hits his stride as a Los Angeles life insurance salesman who works door to door until he comes to the vine-covered villa of Barbara Stanwyck, an oilman's wife, and stays for dinner. "You want to knock him off, don't you baby?" says the fly to the spider. And so begins the grim tale of their romance as told in flashback by MacMurray himself from a prone position, an ever-widening blood stain on his clothing gradually edging out suspense and leaving us with just the facts. Director Billy Wilder co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler from a novel by James M. Cain (the story, for what it's worth, was based on a 1927 Queens, N.Y. murder case in which a man named Albert Snyder was "sash-weighted to death" (Variety) by his wife and her lover for his insurance money). As told by Wilder and Chandler, it is spiced with twists of perverse humor; subtle psychological motivations are out, greed is in. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg write in Hollywood in the Forties: "Double Indemnity, one of the highest summits of film noir, is a film without a single trace of pity or love.... The Californian ambiance is all important.... The film reverberates with the forlorn poetry of late sunny afternoons; the script is as tart as a lemon; and Stanwyck's white rat-like smoothness, MacMurray's bluff duplicity, are beautifully contrasted."

• Directed by Billy Wilder. Written by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder from the novel by James M. Cain. Photographed by John F. Seitz. Music by Miklos Rozsa. With Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall. (1944, 106 mins, 35mm, Print from UCLA Film Archives courtesy MCA/Universal)