Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity (1944)
IMDB #56 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036775/]

The Gist:
Kind of a badass little film noir film, written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. This is an odd pairing, with Raymond Chandler coming on to write the screenplay for someone else's noir novel (Raymond Chandler is probably the most famous noir novelist there was). Anyway, the film moves well, its shot in that beautiful noir style, and the story is relatively engaging. However, the movie lives and dies by the words that the actor's speak, and by that token the film does very well. There is talking through the entire movie, either through the omnipresent voiceover that most noir parodies take up or the rapid fire dialogue that characterized the screwball comedies of the time more than most film noir, but it goes down smoothly enough. In terms of the dialogue, it toes the line between being completely badass and being an awful cliche, and surprisingly both work very well and happen consecutively without issue. I don't know how that happens but it does, and the film that we see is something imminently quotable. In fact, I don't have any large complaints of the film, it is a well-crafted genre film with very good writing, it just didn't have the same impact on me as something like The Maltese Falcon or the Big Sleep or Touch of Evil did. I don't think I cared enough about the characters in this film...maybe that's what it is. But it is still very good.