Here's how:
Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty? He'll be in then.
Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren't you?
Neff: Yeah, I was. But I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.
Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Neff: How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I'd say around ninety.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.
Walter Neff: That tears it.
Classic film noir isn't known for inserting screwball comedy repartee into the middle of a scene. But that's because most film noir wasn't written and directed by Wilder. The above exchange is classic Wilder — funny, tight, rhythmic and tense all at once. Not one word is wasted. Objectively speaking, I'd have to say "Sunset Boulevard" is probably the superior film, but the dialogue in "Double Indemnity" is just so delicious throughout, like light cheese with a slightly pungent aftertaste. There's something deeply acidic lurking beneath the film's airy wit.
Try this one:
Barton Keyes: You know, you, oughta take a look at the statistics on suicide some time. You might learn a little something about the insurance business.
Edward S. Norton: Mister Keyes, I was raised in the insurance business.
Barton Keyes: Yeah, in the front office. Come now, you've never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But, Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No. No soap, Mr. Norton. We're sunk, and we'll have to pay through the nose, and you know it.
Wilder was one of the first screenwriters, I believe, who really mastered the brute poetry of dialogue. There's an edge, a hipness to his best work that almost recalls the jazz-based inflections of beat poetry. The film came out in 1944, and too much of what was happening in cinema at the time was either still entrenched in the silent era or was pulling too deeply from stage melodrama. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz got it right in "Citizen Kane," but even the great "Casablanca" gets mired at times in an overall lugubrious lushness that is dated and, to me at least, slightly alienating.
Wilder's dialogue has the staccato pop and crackle we associate with much more contemporary writers, like David Mamet and the Coens (you can hear Wilder's influence all over "Barton Fink" and Miller's Crossing," and Mamet should have practically been paying Wilder royalties for this scene in "Glengarry Glen Ross"). It's both of its time and completely current. He's one of the only classic Hollywood screenwriters I can say that about (Budd Schulberg is another).
"Double Indemnity" really created the template for so much noir that followed, but it set the bar so high that very few films could come even close to reaching it. It's just one of those movies where everything works.
Wilder had a great run — he was also the man behind "Some Like It Hot," "The Seven Year Itch," "Ace In The Hole," and "The Lost Weekend." They're all must-see films, but if you're not familiar with his work, "Double Indemnity" is a great place to start.
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