Screenplay: Double Indemnity

Overview
"Double Indemnity" is a taut, cynical screenplay credited to Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, adapted from James M. Cain's novella. Presented as a first-person confession, the story follows a morally compromised insurance salesman drawn into a cold-blooded plan by a seductive client. The screenplay distills noir's preoccupation with guilt, fate, and the corrosive power of desire into a lean, dialogue-driven thriller.

Main Characters and Setup
Walter Neff is a smooth, experienced life insurance salesman whose professionalism masks a restless dissatisfaction. Phyllis Dietrichson is the archetypal femme fatale: alluring, manipulative, and willing to use sex and calculation to get what she wants. Barton Keyes, Walter's colleague and friend, is an obsessive, morally grounded claims investigator whose insight into human motive and fraud forms the ethical counterpoint to Walter's compromises. The plot begins when Phyllis approaches Walter about her husband's insurance, and flirtation slides quickly into a conspiracy to secure a payout by turning a life into an "accident."

Plot Summary
Walter succumbs to Phyllis's charm and to the easy logic of a crime that looks like profit: if the husband's death can be made to read as an accidental loss covered by a double-indemnity clause, the couple can collect twice the policy's value. They plan and execute a murder that they intend to stage as an accident, then take steps to file the claim and cover their tracks. At first the confidence of the scheme masks the moral cost, and Walter's narration records both the thrill of complicity and the onset of dread. Barton Keyes, meanwhile, smells something amiss. His relentless attention to small inconsistencies, schedules, behaviors, and paperwork, begins to crack the alibi the conspirators erected. As Keyes draws nearer, paranoia and mistrust grow between Walter and Phyllis, and betrayal replaces alliance. The carefully constructed plot unravels in a violent, desperate finale that leaves lives ruined and bodies lying where choices were made. Mortally wounded, Walter records a full confession on a dictaphone, confessing not just the mechanics of the crime but the reasons that led him there; when Keyes arrives, the professional's moral clarity meets the personal tragedy of a man who chose wrong.

Style and Tone
Chandler's fingerprints show in the screenplay's hard-boiled vernacular and bitter wit, while Wilder's structural precision keeps the narrative compact and relentless. The dialogue is sharp, often overlapping with interior monologue that heightens the sense of fatalism. The screenplay fashions a world of stark moral contrasts rendered in cool irony: men who think they are in control, women who wield erotic power as a weapon, and institutions, like insurance, that reduce human life to policies and clauses. Darkness sits not only in alleys and rain-slick streets but inside the protagonists' hearts.

Themes and Legacy
The screenplay interrogates greed, responsibility, and the illusion that cleverness can outrun conscience. It became a template for film noir not just through plot but through tone: breezy cynicism laced with existential despair, characters whose choices corner them into ruin, and a narrative voice that both seduces and condemns. The marriage of Chandler's language and Wilder's cinematic instincts produced a terse, morally ambivalent drama that continues to be cited as a benchmark of noir storytelling and a masterclass in how dialogue and structure can make crime feel inevitable and tragic.