Darkness in the Everyman: Male Archetypes in the Films Noirs of Billy Wilder

Paper by Lauren Sousa. All films available on DVD.

Any treatise, by any author, about film noir is by its nature reductive. A notoriously slippery group of films, noirs can be difficult to identify, and not everyone agrees on their definition. They were not all made after World War II, they were certainly not all made before the war, and they do not feature any specific set of characteristics. Is Casablanca(Michael Curtiz 1942), for example, which borrows the classic prison-bar-like shadows from, perhaps, John Huston’s proto-noir The Maltese Falcon, from the year before, a noir film? What about The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920), a German Expressionist film widely held as an inspiration for noir? Does one require a detective? Does it need a femme fatale or a murder? To answer any of these questions would be to express a personal opinion and reduce film noir to a checklist, something the darkly beautiful and under-appreciated film group does not need. It’s arguable that Billy Wilder, an Austrian-American director who took to his new home and won six Academy Awards, made far more than two films noirs. It’s equally subjective that his films’ most interesting characters are their men, who both provide stark contrast to two common male noir archetypes. However, of all the characteristics that differentiate Wilder’s noir, Joe Gillis (William Holden) of Sunset Boulevard and especially Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) of Double Indemnity definitely and uniquely demonstrate a specific American fear of the skilled ordinary man with the drive, determination, and intelligence to hide behind his normal exterior an extraordinary propensity to exploit innocents in front of their very eyes.

Depending on the definer, film noir can constitute an aesthetic chiefly marked by low key lighting, Dutch angles, black and white cinematography or the spirit thereof, claustrophobic closed framing, and an interesting lighting effect in which Venetian blinds, lit from the outside, appear to create prison bars in shadows (Lewis 178), or a thematically rich genre involving plot elements such as voiceover narration, most usually some violent crime, and a crucial dichotomy between a manipulative woman willing to commit sometimes heinous crimes, including murder, to get what she wants, called a femme fatale (Muller), and a “good girl,” a “girl next door type” (Harvey 41) who James Harvey calls “the available (and distinctly advisable) alternative to the noir heroine, to the woman we and the hero are really interested in” (29). Springing up during World War II, film noir importantly a genre of patterns, one which was first noted by Nino Frank, a French critic watching American exports, after World War II, in his 1946 essay “A New Kind of Police Drama: The Criminal Adventure.” Reviewing films from 1941 to 1944 and focusing especially on crime films critics at the time referred to as “[melodramas]” (Crowther), Frank identifies four films specifically as “noir:” The Maltese Falcon, Laura (Otto Preminger 1944), Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944), and Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944). These films, he notes, are lean, exciting, and prioritize the psychology of the protagonist over the solving of a mystery while stylistically emphasizing small character gestures and employing realist camera work in contrast to the “pretentious flourishes” (19) of such traditional prestige pictures as How Green Was My Valley (John Ford 1947). Frank notes both aesthetic and thematic elements of noir; here, the guiding principle is that films noirs deal with the anxiety, especially in the light of World War II, that ordinary individuals are not immune to committing inhumanity.

Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are distinguished from their counterparts Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer), “the prototype postwar noir” (Lewis 180) and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947), which James Harvey calls “the richest and most lyrical of all the postwar noir films” (14), in several ways that reveal their different thematic focuses. Each of these films prominently features a femme fatale, while Wilder’s women are older and far more knowing than those of Tourneur or Ulmer, searching always for their “return,” as Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) insists on calling it in Sunset Boulevard, to some past, wonderful time. Indeed, Jane Greer’s Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past suggests only at the end of the film that there has ever been anything in her life to which she would want to return, the idyll in Mexico that she and private eye Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) shared at the beginning of it. In the film’s first half, however, she seems determined only to get away from her abusive boyfriend Whit (Kirk Douglas) with plenty of money to make herself comfortable than to return to any previously desirable state. Perhaps it is her age, just twenty-three at the date of release (“Jane”) that left her no place to go back, but more likely, it seems that it is the character of her past, not its length, that makes it something “worth losing,” as Jeff once says of the other female character in that film, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming). Unlike Kathie, she seems perfectly happy with her life as a tax lawyer’s secretary, but even she will have to find a new life when he turns up dead.

In contrast to these forward-looking women, those in Double Indemnity, even young, innocent Lola Dietrichson (Jean Heather) longs for a time before her stepmother had killed both of her parents. The older, more cynical Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) also seeks a return to form in spirit if not precise details. When she whines, in an early rationalization of her marriage to Mr. Dietrichson, that “I wanted a home,” Phyllis shows both her bitterness at the present and, like Kathie and Vera (Ann Savage) of Detour, the greed that motivated her to kill the first Mrs. Dietrichson. Unlike in Out of the Past, the fragments of her unmarried life as a nurse are never dramatized, only discussed, but despite the domestic trappings it may have lacked, she had at the time an agency that she feels is missing from her married life. She could, at that time, do anything she wanted, including leave, kill, and entrap herself an unhappy prison with all the “luxury and security” (Smith) that an unhappy marriage to an oil man entails. Getting out of this “cage” (Smith) by killing her husband is risky, but a success would give her a tantalizing hybrid of the trappings of wealth and financial independence that younger femmes fatales seek as well as elements of a revered past.

While Phyllis looks both forward and back in planning her life after crime, Norma dooms herself by refusing to acknowledge the future. Her steadfast belief that the days of silent film will continue for her has prevented her from adapting; shut in her Sunset Boulevard mansion, the former star ignores any signal that her creative medium may no longer be relevant and instead idolizes the days of the past and their imminent “return.” Ultimately, her tragic ending is caused by her mere jealousy of Betty (Nancy Olson), who represents for her the younger, less worthy generation stealing from her her fame and, in Betty’s case, her man and the screenwriting skills that she believes will eventually lead to that return. This contrasts with both Kathie and Vera, who are, once again, too young to have much more to which to return than packing bags for Mexico or thumbing a ride in Louisiana.

Obviously, the female characters in Billy Wilder’s films noirs spend the plot of the film searching for a lost paradise in sharp contrast to the female characters of other films noirs, who search with as much determination but less specific direction because they have to find such a situation. While his female characters were complex, however, the most intriguing element of Wilder’s noirs are his male protagonists, who use their innocent professional skills and intimate knowledge of the workings of the minds of their femmes fatales and those who might prevent their deception and criminal behavior for personal gain to nearly pull off these crimes before telling the audience their stories, demonstrating an anxiety, especially in the face of the war, that someone as ordinary as Joe Gillis or Walter Neff could do so much harm with so little detection.

It seems audiences might identify more with Joe Gillis, whose main skill as a screenwriter involves storytelling, a skill which could be learned democratically by, for example, watching movies like Sunset Boulevard. Also, his chief crimes are evading the police who try to repossess his car and manipulating Norma Desmond to care for him financially for re-writing her script to Salomé, which he never believes will be successful and ultimately is not. While Joe is, by all accounts, an ordinary man, he is frightening to a postwar audience because he uses the simple skills he has to his advantage, telling his patron stories not only of her impending “return” to fame after the script is finished but of adoring fans that he knows do not exist. Even worse, he feels only a little shame at his manipulation, which is demonstrated occasionally, such as when he refuses to purchase the more expensive vicuna coat with Norma’s money because it, like his lack of car, shows the many ways that he has given up his agency for a life that, while perhaps less independent or private, has far more of the trappings of wealth than his old unit at the Alto Nido apartment house. It becomes clear just how maliciously he uses those skills when Joe is compared to Al Roberts from Detour. Like Joe, Roberts works in the entertainment industry and harbors dreams of making it big. However, unlike his counterpart in Sunset Boulevard, Roberts’ sole other aspiration, to marry his girlfriend Sue, seems far friendlier and more normal than Joe’s desire to avoid the police and quick and cunning acceptance of a paid position that provides him protection therefrom. Meanwhile, while Joe’s fate is worse than Roberts’, the latter never explicitly desired to commit a crime, and the only time he does, under duress from Vera, he stands to make no money from it. Further, he protests vigorously against impersonating Haskell to obtain even more money; even though his protestations are practical, worrying about such matters as “whether [I would know if] I had an Aunt Emma or not.” Ultimately, though, his brief compliance in the plot is motivated more by Vera’s blackmail and his desire to see Sue again than any hope of personal gain. Although Roberts is cynical and unhappy, even misanthropic, he never deliberately tries to hurt another person, and repeatedly, as when he calls her in Los Angeles and hangs up, tries to protect Sue, the one person for whom he confesses any affection. Even though he takes Haskell’s “roll” of cash and his car, the man confesses to having no family, and Roberts largely wants nothing to do with either item and plans to get rid of the car at his earliest convenience before he picks up Vera. Because the nature of his crimes, which are either accidental or victimless, Al Roberts reveals in its creators different anxieties, largely on the topic of fate, which differs from Sunset Boulevard’s thematic subject matter of criminality in the ordinary man.

It is a mere lack of success – something that could happen to any aspiring screenwriter like Joe – that leads him to the financial pickle inspiring behavior that a viewer might find not only criminal but immoral. Joe Gillis happily, even smugly pulls into a seemingly abandoned driveway to evade the law, and when he finds an opportunity to make money even though he has no hope for the project on which he agrees to work, favoring money over agency every time; even after New Year’s, when he no longer enjoys their arrangement, he continues with it because Norma financially provides for him. Finally, though, his indiscretions are somewhat minor; he mostly builds a web of lies that, upon its shattering, leads to his death. Despite the fact that some of his actions may make viewers uncomfortable at his potentially depraved use of a democratically-gained skill, Joe’s crimes are quite mild when compared to Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff, who uses his intimate and specialized knowledge of the insurance business to nearly commit a perfect crime involving fraud and murder.

It’s clear from the beginning that Walter is up to no good; whether he is motivated by lust, as film critic John Gregory Dunne believes (qtd. in Phillips 59) or by greed combined with his confidence in his ability to benefit immensely, both financially and sexually, from his very specific but quotidian expertise as a claims adjuster at the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company, expressed when, in his dying monologue used as voiceover throughout the film, Walter states that, “I did for the money…and for a woman…and [I] could…[commit fraud] and do it smart.” In this way, aware not only of his understanding of the business but of his potential sordid use for it, the character finds his counterpart in another male noir staple, the private investigator.

Frank writes of that archetype that “the private detective…has nothing to do with bureaucratic function but, by definition…[is] on the fringe of the law” (16). Because the character is not considered a true part of a moral, functioning society, when a private eye such as Out of the Past’s Jeff Bailey lies in telegrams to his boss, Whit, who is, as a gambler, already far enough from a moral center that might condemn Joe Gillis for his financial dependence to forgive any moral expectations, it is expected, even exhilarating to watch. Unlike Walter, with his typical career at an ordinary agency of which there might be one or more prominently advertized in any city or town and with whom most members of the audience probably have a policy of, if not accident insurance, car or life insurance, most ordinary Americans would never come in contact with someone like Jeff or the man he works for. Further, both Out of the Past and Double Indemnity feature a character who fits in the “good girl” archetype, but that character in the former film, Jeff’s fiancée Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), is never ultimately harmed by the criminal machinations of the people with whom she comes in contact; she is kept in “a separate compartment of the movie…quite apart from that woman in the city or the nightclub or the other guy’s home” (Harvey 29), and when every major character in the film (besides Meta) dies, she stays safe and even relatively unaffected; as the agent for ordinary Americana, the character with whom the audience of that film would be most likely to identify, she is not materially disturbed. Indeed, she goes off with the sheriff, her childhood sweetheart, in the same scene she learns that Jeff is gone, allowing her to give up her last ties to a world to which she never belonged. Double Indemnity, however, refuses to coddle its “good girl.” Lola loses both her parents to the ordinary people she should be able to trust and is prevented from telling the truth by the very agent of justice, the agent who sold the insurance, in whom she should be able to confide. She is not kept in any such “compartment,” and if she, like Ann and Betty before her, stands in for the ordinary American viewer, she demonstrates to them exactly how convincing such an ordinary, selfish, malicious skilled man can be.

Certainly, it takes two, in this case, to commit the crime; without Phyllis, Walter would have had no opportunity to kill for profit, but as he says in one of the most famous parts of his Dictaphone monologue, “You’re like that guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don’t crook the house. And then one night you get to thinking how…you’ve got the wheel right under your hands…All you need is a plant out front, a shill to put down the bet.” This quote demonstrates that while meeting Phyllis, who presented reasons to kill her husband, including his drunken violence, that may or may not be true, provided him the catalytic opportunity to “crook the house,” she did not put the idea in his head. It had been on his mind for who knows how long, and he might have done it with anyone; while Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) might have been foolish to trust his wife, it is Walter who carries out every step against him, finding the faulty insurance papers, killing him, and then faking his death: an unknown man who finds in his victim’s wife attractive, but also an opportunity and all the skills necessary the carrying out of his criminal greedy plans nearly undetected.

Even worse than his previous thoughts about committing his crimes and possibly even worse than committing them, Walter manages to hide them from the insurance agency, including, crucially, the head claims adjuster, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), who is shown in several scenes, including in his introduction, when he refuses to process the claim of a man who tried to commit insurance fraud by burning out his truck, as quite a crackerjack, with a bizarre theory about a “little man” who personifies his conscience and helps him solve his cases. In his scenes, after consulting many “actuarial tables” Keyes slowly figures out that the Dietrichson case involved murder, Phyllis, and a partner. Trying to prove his point, he brings in the only person who saw Walter dressed as and claiming to be Dietrichson, a Mr. Jackson (Porter Hall) from Medford, Oregon, but although he confirms the man on the train was not the man who died, he fails to recognize Walter, dismissing his familiarity as owing to the fact that “there’s a family of Neffs in Corvallis.” Late in the film, Walter learns from Keyes’ Dictaphone of the suspicion against him as Phyllis’s in crime, only to have it dispelled moments later by the man who should have been his biggest opponent in getting away with the crime “personally [vouching] for him without reservation.” Of course, in the end, Keyes is right that when two people commit a murder together, “the last stop is the cemetery,” but that still does not happen before Walter takes his last hours to explain into his Dictaphone the whole story from his own perspective for the audience and the man who should have found him out, “Only the guy you were looking for was too close — he was right across the desk from you.” That “each [flashback], the bloodstain on Walter’s suit coat is larger” (Phillips 64) means that the audience cannot help feeling some sympathy for the dying man, even as his ingratiation in an essential part of many Americans’ lives means he is able to commit crimes that ruin a few of them and inspire anxiety in other people just like him who fear other benignly skilled men who could do the same.

Walter and Phyllis set up a standing meeting at a local supermarket to discuss their impending crime; the two times they meet are of the most anxious scenes in the movie, in part because the viewer worries whether the other shoppers, such as a woman for whom Walter takes baby food off a shelf, will find out about their plans and in part because it is frightening to consider that such a horrible subject might be discussed in such day-to-day surroundings. Far more interesting to watch than this scene, however, partially takes place in the same setting: it is the one following their first grocery store rendezvous, a week later in the film’s chronology, in which Keyes offers Walter a promotion and Walter and Phyllis talk on the phone with him in the room.

The purpose of the scene in the plot is to set up the murder more concretely for the audience, which it does successfully through voiceover and Walter and Phyllis’s phone conversation. The scene is not so simple as that, though; the character business it features is even more impressive, and its densely-packed ironies are very entertaining in light of the rest of the film.

The scene begins with a long take, a shot of over two minutes over Walter’s shoulder. As the violin score becomes more hurried and staccato, fading into the background, he updates the chronology in voiceover while the image shows him opening envelopes, emphasizing that June 15^th, the date of the scene, is not much different from any other day at Pacific All-Risk, except that he is trying to “keep [his] mind off [Phyllis]” as Barton Keyes walks in. The low-key lighting, film grain, and a fly incidentally buzzing demonstrate the realism that Billy Wilder consciously included in his film to, in his own words, “match the kind of story we were telling” (qtd. in Phillips 62) and show just how run-of-the-mill, even slightly amoral, are the settings in which this scene and the film as a whole are shot. The claims man’s unannounced arrival underscores that this setting, like the market, is a public place; it is now, too, that the two other names on Walter’s office door come into focus. As Keyes’ proposal that Walter become his assistant becomes more serious, he walks forward in the room, growing in size, relevance, and threatening presence in an attempt to convince Walter to become his assistant at a lower salary. Significantly, in this part of the scene, Keyes’ is the only face the viewer sees head-on, which allows him to dominate the scene without being upstaged; therefore, it is his impassioned emotions that carry the first shot, foreshadowing the enthusiasm that he will muster to consider the Dietrichson case. His climax of ardor comes when he exclaims, with his back turned, that the forms he reads on a daily basis are “packed with drama,” when Phyllis calls on the phone, interrupting him before he finishes the soliloquy by listing the roles he must take on as head of claims: “a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor, all in one.” As close to Walter as Keyes gets, even as close as to sit on his desk, he never gets quite as large in the frame, and his square-standing posture never competes for dominance with Walter’s often idle but always diagonal presence in the frame. In this way, Walter visually asserts the dominance he will have over Keyes for the rest of the film; no matter how fervid his investigation, Walter’s quiet, simple stance will overpower Keyes; he literally will die before he is found guilty.

The scene begins to actively cause anxiety when Walter takes the phone from Keyes. Of course, from the voiceover and the viewer’s knowledge of Walter’s life, it is no surprise that the woman on the phone is Phyllis Dietrichson, but while the questions on the viewer’s mind are similar to those that occupy them during the preceding scene, the situation is far more serious: if anyone could do them in, it is Keyes. Further, the scene’s placement, roughly one-third into the film, means the audience has had time to gather sympathy for Walter and Phyllis. When Walter turns around and the viewer sees his face for the first time in the scene, his unsure and obviously unpracticed lying – calling Phyllis “Margie” with a sick look on his face – increases the dramatic tension even before the scene reaches its point: they will commit the murder tonight. Walter switches the side on which he is holding the phone, notably turning away from Keyes and towards the viewer, as this bit of information is revealed. The publicity of both settings becomes clear before it is addressed onscreen: Phyllis, in the phone booth at the supermarket, turns her head away from the stockboy, the only person apparently in the store, but as she mentions that her husband has broken his leg, several shoppers walk by; in the next shot, Walter specifically asks Keyes for privacy, a request that he denies. With Walter always larger in the frame during the phone conversation, the composition reinforces the fact that he is in control; Keyes will not find out, at least from this side of the phone call, what is going on. Even the cryptic line, “What color did you pick?” referring to the suit Mr. Dietrichson will wear, does not rouse his curiosity. Also worth noting is Stanwyck’s acting during her last shot in the scene. After a somewhat nervous performance in the rest of the scene, in which she includes details Walter apparently never thought to ask, she suddenly becomes excited, almost rapturous, as if she was going to a party or on vacation instead of planning a murder. That she might be happy, if nervous, in this scene is a little unsettling; when convincing Walter to commit the murder, she emphasized how dismayed she was to be married to her husband and what they would do with the money, but never suggesting she would feel glee at the great misfortune she was to cause. Therefore, for the first time, Phyllis reveals her true colors in this shot before the film’s focus returns to Walter.

After the phone conversation, the shot changes; the camera moves in front of Walter’s desk instead of behind it. The frame in this case is far more balanced, relieving some of the compositional anxiety that was present for more than half of the scene. Ironically, the conversation turns not just to the fictional “Margie” but a woman that Keyes nearly married until he found out too much about her storied past. His suspicion of “Margie,” who is really Phyllis and who he believes “drinks from the bottle,” indicating that she has no class, is ironic in light of the fact that it takes him so little time to determine her plot. His belief that there are better things for Walter, shown when he asks “why don’t you settle down and get married?” also foreshadowing his blindness to his friend’s complicity with Phyllis. The next shot, just before Keyes leaves the room, also features foreshadowing. Admitting that he thought Walter “a shade less dumb than the rest,” he comes to the conclusion, in light of the younger man’s refusal of a new job, that he is “just a little taller,” suggesting, in almost absolute terms, what he will discover by the film’s end; before he walks out, Walter lights Keyes’ cigar, a moment that is reversed in the finale.

After Keyes leaves, the shot changes once again, to a wide shot facing the door directly. The small objects in the room and on the desk become clear, clouding the composition and suggesting, along with the voiceover and anxious, rising score, Walter’s emotions and fear. He leaves his rate book in the office as part of his alibi and goes home – apparently at three in the afternoon.

The setting is ordinary; the characters are ordinary, even the types of people an everyday American would know. Sunset Boulevard scratches the surface of the idea that a normal man could be, behind his charming façade, a skilled trickster. Double Indemnity, in spite of its earlier release, elaborates on the idea that in a public realm, though he may come close, the cunning, capable individual shown in the scene analyzed will not be discovered because of his simple, trustworthy appearance and personality and his ability to hide, sometimes very nearly in plain sight, what is going on. Though the film takes place in mid-1938, before the war began, it is easy to see how, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Americans would be frightened by the injustice committed seemingly right under their noses. After the war, James Harvey notes that Americans worried about “hysteria and fear in the girl next door and…criminality in the respectable working girl” that Hitchcock featured in such films as The Man Who Knew Too Much and Psycho (85), meaning that these messages have had resonance in various eras, including today; they tap into the basic fear that we may not be able to trust what we do, which spans beyond cultural events.

Film noir ultimately affected Hollywood pictures as much as it reflected American fears of darkness in the everyman. The James M. Cain novelette that serves as the source material for Double Indemnity was initially considered far too risqué for a film for general audiences, but after it was toned down, the picture was approved (Phillips 55), marking it as one of many genres that dealt heavily with industry censorship. Noir, however, managed to work mostly on innuendo, such as Phyllis and Walter’s conversation early in the film including the classic line, “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff: forty-five miles an hour,” and off-screen violence, such as the classic close-up of Phyllis staring stone-faced ahead while her husband is killed a mere few feet away. Perhaps, though, something more important than Wilder’s clever use of implication still reverberates in the entertainment of today. In Joe Gillis and to a much greater extent Walter Neff, Wilder helped to gain acceptance for the antihero, an ordinary protagonist who fails to fill the shoes of a more epic individual, one who might do bad things for good or for selfish ends. The character can be seen in endless neo-noirs, such as the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There(2001), and, more recently, on television: Jeff Jansen of Entertainment Weekly isn’t alone in comparing Breaking Bad to the type of film once noted as “tough melodramas” (Crowther) and its antihero, another Walter, is also a completely normal, professional man, one who even works with children before he turns to a life of crime.

Film noir was not a genre created self-consciously, but it is nevertheless doubtless that the group of films now thus defined has changed the definition of what is acceptable material in a film and just how similar a protagonist can be to the idealized viewer. The noirs of Billy Wilder raise questions about normalcy, alienation, sanity, and greed; sometimes, they are answered. More often, though, Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, like any other films, show a viewer themselves through the mirror that is their personal reactions. The work of this misanthropic director in a notably misanthropic genre means that they, and we, might not always enjoy what that mirror displays, but it is nonetheless worth questioning, that we might discover more about the characters who live out the struggles that define us in the context of a genre, an era, and a world.

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