Taking a necessary break from watching a movie I know practically by heart, Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY. (Had stuff to do that needed to be done right away.)
And before I get back to it, this observation, complete with SPOILER WARNING for what I hope will be the very few of you who haven’t encountered book or movie.
This film is a poster child against the facile argument of people who don’t understand the mechanics of story-telling as much as they think they do, that movies departing from novelistic source material will always go wrong, or that “the book is always better than the movie.”
Well, in this case the book and movie are both masterpieces, but of different kinds.
The novel was written by James M. Cain, a grandmaster; the movie by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, two other grandmasters.
Both are about an insurance man who conspires with a client’s wife to kill her husband by faking an accident, then collect the big payout.
The movie mostly adheres to the mechanics of the novel, but changes the ending.
It changes more that that, actually. James M. Cain was one of the best there ever was, and few novels have opened with a single sentence that tells you as much about the protagonist as the first sentence of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, “They threw me off the hay truck around noon.” There’s a reason why his novels fueled multiple movies, but his greatness did not include dialogue; what he wrote was actually hard for living human beings to say, which is why it was such a good thing for Chandler to take a hack at it.
(MILDRED PIERCE has been filmed twice that I know of, and I’ve gotta tell you — the Joan Crawford version departs from the original even *more*. The Kate Winslet version, a five-hour miniseries, tells the *whole* story, without a silly murder plot, and I think that it’s better, but folks still remember weeping Joan…)
And the endings….!
The novel ends with protagonist Neff getting the hell out of town with the woman he killed for, and taking a cruise to Mexico. He realizes on the way that she’s not just reckless but crazy — watching her put on her makeup, to clownlike excess, is the giveaway — and that he doesn’t love her. They will likely be arrested and extradited when they hit shore. At the end, still going through the motions, he persuades her to go up on deck with him, and the strong implication is an incipient murder-suicide, which is no less than they both deserve.
The movie ends with Neff, dying from a bullet wound, being discovered by his friend after he’s dictated his full confession into a tape recorder.
Now, as a novelist, and as a reader, I prefer that first ending.
I can’t quite believe that it would have worked in a movie, certainly not a movie of the period. The movie gives you exactly what you need at that moment, the sense the book’s ending does that this sap’s goose was cooked the instant he met her. And it does without all the tragedy-of-manners stuff from the novel.
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