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Summary: Read the book, see the movie
Review: This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour with one hand tied behind your back.Let me try that again. This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour without breaking a sweat. Okay, how's this? This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour even if you're the kind of person who moves your lips when you read. This is not to imply that Cain is the kind of writer who mixes his metaphors or hasn't gotten beyond primer prose. I mean, Shakespeare mixed his metaphors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Cain wrote literature then it was by accident. Come to think of it, Shakespeare was only trying to turn a shilling, please a patron or give an actor some range. I guess real literature comes about when you're just trying to make ends meet and somehow you get inspired and don't even know it. Cain didn't think much of this, calling it something like tripe and saying it would never be published as a book. He wrote it to appear as a serial in Redbook magazine, but Redbook rejected it so it appeared in Liberty magazine in 1935. It didn't make hardcover until the forties just before it was made into an excellent movie by Hollywood great Billy Wilder starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. In fact, to be honest, the movie is better than the book, which as everyone knows, is usually not the case. He also wrote this to take advantage of the surprising success of his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which Knopf published to critical acclaim on its way to bestsellerdom. Cain's stream-lined and hard-boiled faux Hemingway style charmed the critics and made the dime novel reader feel like he was reading Nathanael West or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald. Re-reading Cain's first person narrative today is a lot like watching a movie from the forties, mainly because the movies so often imitated him with their film noir voice-overs and desperate crimes for love or money. Indeed a number of Cain's novels have been made into movies, Double Indemnity, Postman, and Mildred Pierce, the most memorable. Here we have a painstakingly planned murder for the insurance money. It is so perfectly conceived that it would take a miracle for everything to fall into place. And yet it does, and yet something goes wrong. In the Wilder movie, insurance salesman Walter Neff (Walter Huff here) does it mostly out of an irresistible desire to put something over on the insurance business he has worked at all his adult life, while here in Cain's novel, Huff explains his motivation to Phyllis Nirdlinger, sociopathic wife of the intended victim: "Just pulling off some piker job, that don't interest me. But this, hitting it for the limit, that's what I go for. It's all I go for." He means that the "accident" has to take place on a train so that they can collect a double indemnity from a standard clause in the policy. Today's amoralist might proclaim that he did it for the rush of doing something almost nobody ever got away with. My problem with the novel is not the convenient way everything fell into place, or with how unlikely it was that Keyes might figure what he figured out, but with the stupid ending. You've got to read it to believe it, actually. Billy Wilder changed the ending in the movie to something more plausible. He, along with Raymond Chandler, who worked on the script with him, actually improved on the Cain novel in several places. As in Postman, Cain's antihero does his dirty work from the back of the car while the wife drives and the victim rides shotgun. (The contrivance needed to get him into the back seat strains credence but Wilder fixes that.) In truth, Cain was right: this novel needed a little work. He does NOT, however, repeat the sexual "celebration" beside the car after the murder in Postman, a scene that so shocked depression era readers. Indeed, here the two murderers are already beginning to sour on one another. What Cain does so well is to probe into our dark psyches and to let loose the dogs of dirty deeds done dumb so that we might experience vicariously the hell they might lead to. Notable in the novel is the character of Phyllis, an ex-nurse with the psychopathic mind of a serial killer. That part was played down in the movie. In the movie Cain's antihero is given human dimension through the mutual affection he has with Keyes. In the novel that affection is muted, but Cain humanizes him by showing the sincere, but hands off, love he has for the dead man's 19-year-old daughter. It's worth reading this to compare it to the movie and to see how two great screenwriters (Wilder and Chandler) handle material from a novel. It is also worth reading for the snapshot of pre-World War II Los Angeles afforded. Of course any true film noir fan or student of American lit ought not to miss this. I suggest however that you write your own ending.
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Summary: Mr. Moreno's Book Review Of Double Indemnity
Review: Title: Double Indemnity Author: James M. Cain Key Moment: When Miss Nirdlinger (Lola) tells Mr. Huff of her suspicion of Phyllis being a murderer because it reveals how Ms. Nirdlinger (Phyllis) really is and shows Lola's decieving style. Plot: Mr. Huff is an insurance sales agent who purposely frames a client (Mr. Nirdlinger) by killing him, making it look like an accident, and collecting the 'accidental-death' money by teaming up with the client's wife, Phyllis. But Mr. Huff is in for more than that. This book should be mainly for adults but still ok for younger readers because some of the technical details is hard to follow for teenagers but still a good book for adults and adolescents. Opinion: This novel was really good , full if thrills and suspense . It keeps the reader guessing everytime and keeps them attached to the book till it's over.
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Summary: Kurts Review
Review: Title: The title of the book is Double Indemnity. Author: The author of Double Indemnity is James M. Cain Key Moment in the book: a key moment in the novel was when Mrs. Nirdlinger asked for insurance when it is usually offered. This made her seem suspicious. Two line summary: Double Indemnity is a mystery about an insurance and a woman trying to kill her husband and make it look like an accident so they can collect the insurance money. Opinion: This is a good book. This book will leave you guessing form beginning to end. Recommendations: I would recommend this book to anyone who likes mysteries. If you have never read a mystery before, Double Indemnity is a good one to start with. All high school students should read this book.
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Summary: Double Intensity
Review: Ugly as sin and twice as fascinating, Cain get to the essentials of why people kill faster than anyone else in American literature. Phyllis is the American psychopath par excellence; Bret Easton Ellis' collection of brand name droppers cant even come close to the pure cold poisonous light that comes off this woman. Walter Huff thinks he's got a brain in his head but he's just a moth waiting to get fried. The story of the perfect murder and how it falls apart, a warning to be careful about what you wish for: you just might get it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Crime Noir Novella
Review: Walter Huff is a pretty decent and basically honest insurance salesman, until he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a successful California businessman. Phyllis isn't the most attractive woman, but she's a true seductress. Huff immediately knows that Phyllis will be trouble, but he can't resist her, and she quickly involves him in a plot to kill her husband. Things become even more complicated when Phyllis' step-daughter, Lola, enters the scene and bonds with Huff. James M. Cain is one of the indisputable greats of crime noir novels, and he also wrote the terrific "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The plot is fast-moving, and I love Cain's stattaco writing style. He also includes so much great detail, such as the "blood red curtains" in Phyllis' living room. Further, Cain makes the action very believable and doesn't overlook any plot holes, which is not always the case in this genre. I really liked this book. Having said that, I think that the movie (1944, directed by the peerless Billy Wilder) is even better than the book. I know that's blasphemous, but the movie is one of the all-time great American movies. Read the book and don't miss the movie either!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Crime Noir Novella
Review: Walter Huff is a pretty decent and basically honest insurance salesman, until he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a successful California businessman. Phyllis isn't the most attractive woman, but she's a true seductress. Huff immediately knows that Phyllis will be trouble, but he can't resist her, and she quickly involves him in a plot to kill her husband. Things become even more complicated when Phyllis' step-daughter, Lola, enters the scene and bonds with Huff. James M. Cain is one of the indisputable greats of crime noir novels, and he also wrote the terrific "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The plot is fast-moving, and I love Cain's stattaco writing style. He also includes so much great detail, such as the "blood red curtains" in Phyllis' living room. Further, Cain makes the action very believable and doesn't overlook any plot holes, which is not always the case in this genre. I really liked this book. Having said that, I think that the movie (1944, directed by the peerless Billy Wilder) is even better than the book. I know that's blasphemous, but the movie is one of the all-time great American movies. Read the book and don't miss the movie either!
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Summary: wicked little morality tale
Review: Walter Huff is just your run-of-the-mill insurance salesman, maybe a slightly sharper operator than most, until the day he stops by the Nirdlinger place to renew a policy and meets the new Mrs. Nirdlinger, Phyllis. She takes an unusual interest in the details of her husband's coverage, even needling Walter about the possibility of switching to the Automobile Club : She talked along, and there was nothing I could do but go along with it. But you sell as many people as I do, you don't go by what they say. You feel it, how the deal is going. And after a while I knew this woman didn't care anything about the Automobile Club.... But all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair. 'Do you handle accident insurance ?' Walter is just stupid enough, because he thinks he's so smart, that he helps Phyllis plan the perfect crime; together they'll murder her husband and make it look like an accident so they can claim the double indemnity payment on his insurance policy, a policy that they'll purchase without his knowledge. But in order to get away with it they'll have to fool the company's paranoid claims man... Walter has just enough sense to know how long the odds are, but he's hooked : I live in a bungalow in the Los Feliz hills.... I lit a fire and sat there, trying to figure out where I was at. I knew where I was at, of course. I was standing right on the deep end, looking over the edge, and I kept telling myself to get out of there, and get quick, and never come back. But that was what I kept telling myself. What I was doing was peeping over that edge, and all the time I was trying to pull away from it, there was something in me that kept edging a little closer, trying to get a better look. So he's in it 'til the bitter end, but the biggest problem, bigger even than Keyes, is that he and Phyllis will have to trust one another completely. They can't afford to question each other's loyalty or motives at all, because : That's all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate. And, of course, since this is James M. Cain, there's not just one drop, there's a veritable deluge. No one has ever written noir better than Cain. It's easy to see why he was so influential, particularly on the French existentialists (see Orrin's review of The Stranger by Camus). But they seem to have missed one very important, and quintessentially American, point. These tales are starkly moralistic. For all that the characters may behave amorally, as soon as as they take that step over the edge we know that a sure and brutal reckoning awaits. There's something positively Puritanical about the whole genre, where satisfying your basest desires brings down a nearly cosmic justice upon your head. I like that. GRADE : A+
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Summary: HIDEOUSLY BEAUTIFUL
Review: Walter Neff is a bored insurance salesman who fantisizes of ways to cheat the company by committing the perfect murder, without ever doing anything about it. Phyllis Nardlinger is a Hollywoodland housewife who is quietly psychotic, (complete with a fantasy of being the angel of death,) has killed before and will kill again. Just because you've seen the movie, don't think you know the book. Still shocking after nearly seventy years after publication!! POSTMAN is great but this one's greater!
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Summary: Classic Study of a Femme Fatale
Review: What begins as an innocent encounter turns into something sinister and deadly. But what happens when the co-conspirators begin to mistrust each other? Readers seeking the answer to that question will not be able to put this book down. The suspense begins on the first page and continues until the very end. The characters are very well developed and the plot is one of the best. This book is great entertainment. Who would ever guess that insurance could be this interesting?
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