Just a perfect film noir..
... exactly because NOBODY is clean here! Nobody has really pure motives. Even the guy trying to solve what he thinks is a crime, Neff's boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), looks at this as a puzzle to be solved, money to be saved for his insurance company, not a wrong to be righted. Sure, he does some verbal moralizing to Neff along the way, never guessing that he is talking to one of the perpetrators, but it is just a coincidence.
The dialogue is as sharp as a knife, and MacMurray and Stanwyck, this unlikely pair of conspirators, are the absolute best at delivering dialogue with wicked incisiveness. The plot is very simple, but is so intense that it can never find the blanket of infinity which devours it. Neff (MacMurray) knows Dietrichson (Stanwyck) is up to no good and is a deviant of the highest degree. He dislikes her, certainly does not trust her, but he is entangled by her magnetism and potent sexuality. He is a fly caught in her web. He has much opportunity to escape from this nightmare, before the deed is done, but never does.
Eddie Muller hosted this on Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley the other night, and I thought he could not bring anything new to a film I've seen a hundred times, yet he did. He raises the question - Why DID Neff, when he believed he was dying, go back to the insurance office in the middle of the night and confess everything to Keyes via a dictaphone, when his destination was Mexico? Was it an act of contrition, as the production code might want us to believe, or was it an act of bravado, perhaps wanting his boss to know that he was the smarter egg after all, and not being sure he would live to tell it to him in person? You decide.
The dialogue is as sharp as a knife, and MacMurray and Stanwyck, this unlikely pair of conspirators, are the absolute best at delivering dialogue with wicked incisiveness. The plot is very simple, but is so intense that it can never find the blanket of infinity which devours it. Neff (MacMurray) knows Dietrichson (Stanwyck) is up to no good and is a deviant of the highest degree. He dislikes her, certainly does not trust her, but he is entangled by her magnetism and potent sexuality. He is a fly caught in her web. He has much opportunity to escape from this nightmare, before the deed is done, but never does.
Eddie Muller hosted this on Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley the other night, and I thought he could not bring anything new to a film I've seen a hundred times, yet he did. He raises the question - Why DID Neff, when he believed he was dying, go back to the insurance office in the middle of the night and confess everything to Keyes via a dictaphone, when his destination was Mexico? Was it an act of contrition, as the production code might want us to believe, or was it an act of bravado, perhaps wanting his boss to know that he was the smarter egg after all, and not being sure he would live to tell it to him in person? You decide.
- AlsExGal
- 4 janv. 2019