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Double Indemnity (Chandler, 1995) is a classic film of American cinema: It is included among the 150 films selected to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Stellar performances by Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes highlight the film. The screenplay was based on a 1936 magazine serial written by James M. Cain. In 1944 Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler teamed to write the screenplay and Wilder directed the film (Schickel, 1992).
Lucas (1992) summarizes the plot: “Phyllis Dietrichson seduces an insurance agent, Walter Neff, into devising a brilliant scheme to murder her husband and collect on his accident insurance policy.” “The black widow played by Stanwyck is an archetypal construction,” asserts Lucas. Although not the first femme fatale to appear in film noir, the role of Phyllis is one of the earliest portrayals and became an important influence on this character type/stereotype. Evans (1992) remarks that Phyllis's “cool and calculating strategies are designed to cause havoc, as she strives single-mindedly to strike at the male order in the pursuit of unbridled self-gratification.”
“Following her lead,” Hirsch (1981) states, “the genre [of film noir] presented a string of dominating females whose toughness may well have reflected a change of status produced by the war…. The genre portrayed female strength as brazenly sexual, madly aggressive. Filtered through noir's transforming lens, the decade's New Woman became the femme fatale in whose presence no man was safe.” Hirsh comments on Stanwyck: “Her greatest noir role, that of the murderous wife in Double Indemnity, is the embodiment of menace: a woman who dispenses death without any feelings whatsoever. She