I rewatched the whole film looking for a shot – and was more than delighted to do so – but all along I was pretty certain where I was going to end up: the first grocery store scene. A refresher for those who haven’t seen the film recently, or who (God forbid!) haven’t seen it ever, it’s at this point that Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) have their final meeting before the fatal night when they put in motion their plan to kill Phyllis’s husband for $100,000 in insurance money.
In finest noir tradition, the movie is all about the deadliness of the female, and we could broadly describe the film’s plot as being about a man who thinks he’s come up with the perfect murder and the perfect resentful wife to execute it with, not realising until much too late that his partner in crime has been the one playing him all along. Walter is an archetypal noir dupe: convinced that he’s the smartest one in the room when he’s really just a pawn, and in Stanwyck’s hands, the patently misogynist genre staple of the femme fatale is given a degree of complexity and depth found virtually nowhere else.
The grocery store sequence powerfully underlines all of this. It’s the film’s narrative bottleneck, in which the two anti-heroes pass the point of no return; it’s the point where Wilder tips his hand about Phyllis’s cold-bloodedness as well, in a long take (and there’s nothing like a ’40s movie to remind you of how much richer acting used to be when shots held on longer) that mostly consists of her putting on a very low-grade freakout for Walter’s benefit, but glazing over the very second he turns away.
It’s more the case that this is an exceptionally typical moment of Stanwyck’s performance, rather than a exceptionally great one (the bar for “greatest moments” is exceptionally high in this instance), but it’s a crystallising moment, and while we can spend the rest of the movie being blown over by the shading the actress provides to this stock character, there’s never anything from here on out that can alter our basic impression of who she is.
But even more than offering a fine moment to goggle at Stanwyck’s acting (which could, honestly, have happened anywhere in the movie), I knew I wanted to stick with the grocery store scene because it’s maybe the most characteristically Wilder-esque scene in the movie. So much chiaroscuro, so many offices and plush L.A. mansions, and for the moment where the two killers commit to their villainous plot to take place in a blandly-lit, run-of-the-mill haven of ’40s consumerism is the best kind of claustrophobic Wilder irony. Double Indemnity is one of the least-comic films of his career, but in a moment like this it’s still saturated with a kind of dark absurdity. Certainly, that sign for baby food right next to Stanwyck’s glaring face is a ridiculous, snide joke that only someone like Wilder could dream up, and it’s grace notes like that which make Double Indemnity arguably the very best of all noirs.