In celebration of Noirvember, MovieJawn is collaborating with Erik Kreffel of Noir Crazy! Each week we will walk down the dark alley for a different theme within the genre to peek between the blinds and showcase some of Erik’s work that he created specifically for MovieJawn. Read all our Noirvember articles here.

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by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

I once asked Barbara Stanwyck the secret of acting, and she said, "Just be truthful, and if you can fake that, you've got it made."
–Walter Matthau

Double Indemnity (1944) didn’t make Barbara Stanwyck a star, but it did make her an icon. By the time she was cast, she had already dazzled audiences in some of the best screwball comedies, like The Lady Eve (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941) and Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1944). Her sex appeal in those films is part of her charm, and, in the context of a screwball comedy, she used it to great effect as a brash woman running circles around the men she was paired with, but all in good fun and usually with a “happily ever after.” But her casting as Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity would alter the course of her career as it helped define the essence of a new style of thriller.

Phyllis Dietrichson is not only one of the most impactful femme fatales ever committed to film but also one of the most enjoyable to watch villains. From the first time that Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) sees Phyllis–she’s standing on a balcony, appropriately looking down at him–she draws him into her web. Even “unmade” in her bathrobe, her “lacquer-hardened platinum waves” and her extremely flirtatious repartee with MacMurray show Stanwyck to be in perfect control. She further captures him with a suggestive little anklet, drawing Walter’s attention to her legs as she peppers him with questions and encourages his flirting. He’s trying to sell her insurance; she’s already planning on double crossing him.

The script, co-written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, offers a lot of complexity to Phyllis, as it explores why a woman might kill. That reason is ultimately for freedom, for escape. Walter doesn’t comprehend his predicament until too late because Phyllis knows how to wrangle men and keep them dangling, but as a married woman in a country where she couldn’t get a line of credit without her husband’s signature, this power was still limiting. There was no way for her to break free without turning to crime. In this endeavor, the script depicts Phyllis as cold but alluring, to the point of pushing the bounds of traditional femininity. As Angelica Jade Bastién writes in her essay on Double Indemnity for Criterion:

Stanwyck’s marriage of the technical and the emotional crafts a femme fatale against whom all others are measured. She’s intelligent, conniving, and driven fiercely by her own unique desires. It’s a tricksy portrait that isn’t easy to sum up with the neat phrases that have come to dominate our understanding of images of women in film, such as “the male gaze” and “empowerment.” Stanwyck defies these terms through a cunning physicality and a keen insight into Phyllis’s knotted interior life.

Stanwyck’s physicality is a key to her success as an actress. By Double Indemnity, she had perfected the use of her face, especially her expressive eyes. While Walter is enraptured by the twinkling of the anklet around Phyliss’ bare leg–and there is no denying that Stanwyck has great legs and knows how to use them–it is her eyes that are the most alluring. Stanwyck uses them to tell Phyllis’ truth; her acting makes Phyllis more real, more truthful and allows us and Walter to believe her, to step willingly into her trap. Which is why she is wearing sunglasses in the iconic supermarket sequence. It’s the first hint that she might be up to no good and that Walter is about to become a patsy.

After Double Indemnity, Stanwyck would go on to play so many femme fatales and other “fallen women” that she joked that her “only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.” After Double Indemnity, Stanwyck would return to comedies briefly for Christmas in Connecticut (1945) and The Bride Wore Boots (1946), her last feature comedies. After that, she starred in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), where she plays the titular role, a woman convinced that she murdered her aunt when she was thirteen–it was an accident–and is tangled in a web of blackmail and manipulation as an adult. At one point in the film, Ivers is described as “a little girl in a cage waiting for someone to let her out.” That is an apt description for Ivers–and Stanwyck–and immediately called to mind the English lyrics for Shakira’s song “She Wolf:” “There's a she wolf in the closet/Open up and set it free.”

Watching Martha Ivers, it is easy to see Stanwyck’s progression and how she thinks of these kinds of characters. Through her performance, she creates these women that seem close to the “ice queen,” but, by the end of the film, their inner brokenness will also be laid bare for the audience. In the case of Ivers, this is a woman who has been caged by the men who took advantage of her, and the only person who can potentially offer her a way out is her childhood love, Sam (Van Heflin). But she has been caged too long and, in her desperation to get out, traps herself and her blackmailing husband together with no way out.

Martha Ivers has an even more tragic end than Phyllis Dietrichson. Even though they are both dead by the end of their respective stories, Ivers was trapped by her terrible childhood and the manipulation of a much older man after the accidental killing of Martha’s aunt. She isn’t as manipulative as Phyllis, but both are pushing back on patriarchal forces that keep them from being free. For my westerns column, I wrote about Stanwyck’s performance in the noir western The Furies (1950), in which she also plays a woman who manipulates men so that she can attain a status unavailable to her otherwise (her character, Vance Jeffords, does have a happier ending, at least). All three of these women yearn for freedom and are twisted into devilish beauties that use their cunning, charm and wits to try to achieve their goals. And after watching a few Stanwyck noirs, I fully believe that if the devil was real, he’d fall for her too.