silver nitrate notes

Double Indemnity and the Black in Every Shadow

12 aug 2018

John F. Seitz (1892-1979) photographed over a hundred films between 1916 and 1960. Most are forgotten. Double Indemnity (1944) is the one people remember, and fairly. The lighting choices he and Billy Wilder made on this film, more than the story or the actors, are what we mean when we say "film noir" as a visual style.

Wilder had wanted Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Paramount said no. He ended up with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, who were better. Raymond Chandler, working with Wilder on the screenplay, hated Wilder. The feeling was not entirely mutual but close enough. Out of this discomfort came the first major studio film noir with a proper name, Wilder's direction, and Seitz's camera.

What Seitz does in this film is refuse to light the room. The apartment of Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) is shot almost entirely in near-darkness. The living room has a venetian blind on the street window and Seitz uses it, photographing across it so that the bands of slatted shadow fall across faces, across furniture, across the floor. This is not a showy effect in the film. It is the default state of the image. Every indoor scene has a source of light somewhere that the camera makes an issue of.

Walter Neff's apartment is lit by a single table lamp. Dietrichson's is lit by a single window. The Dietrichson kitchen is lit by one ceiling bulb. The drug store where Neff and Phyllis meet again is lit by its own fluorescents, which Seitz leaves glaring into the lens. The insurance office at Pacific All Risk, where Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) works, is the only space in the film that is lit flat and bright, and that choice is part of the film's moral argument: Keyes is the only honest man in the story, and the place he works is the only place the camera feels safe in.

The famous shot of Neff walking into the Pacific All Risk office at the end, wounded, is shot with a single low key source on his face and the rest of the frame going almost completely black. He is bleeding. The camera knows it before Keyes does. Seitz's decision to let the frame go that dark, in a 1944 studio film, is the one that made everyone who saw it think differently about what a Hollywood film could look like.

Chandler hated Wilder. He loved the film. In a letter to Charles Morton in 1946 he called it the only picture he had worked on that had come out the way he wanted it to. Given that Chandler had worked on exactly two pictures by then, it is not the ringing endorsement it might sound, but he meant it.

Seitz was nominated for seven cinematography Oscars in his career and never won. He was nominated for this one and lost to Joseph LaShelle for Laura. Laura is a fine film. This is the better-shot one.

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sources
[1] Schickel, Richard. Double Indemnity. BFI Film Classics, 1992.
[2] Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. Hyperion, 1998.
[3] Chandler, Raymond. The Raymond Chandler Papers, ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane. Atlantic Monthly, 2000.
[4] Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.