Nice guys finish last: in praise of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity

Fred MacMurray had been a movie star for almost a decade before Double Indemnity (1944). With clean-cut good looks and a cheerful affect, he was a jovial lead of screwball comedies and romantic dramas, establishing popular screen partnerships with Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard. He wasn’t the kind of actor you’d expect to see embroiled in a lust-fuelled murder cover-up.

But by 1944, the as-yet-to-be-named genre of film noir had started pulling in the nice guys. Trying to cast the killer lead character of Double Indemnity, writer-director Billy Wilder had received refusals from just about everyone. Dick Powell was the only actor eager to play Walter Neff, but he had a well-established reputation as a song-and-dance man, and Wilder “[didn’t] want to take a singer”. That same year, Powell would go on to star in the excellent Murder, My Sweet, and then another six successful film noirs over the next decade, seamlessly making the switch from happy hoofer to stony-faced PI. As MacMurray would discover after Wilder eventually persuaded him to sign up, there was no better genre for surprising audiences with the full range of your abilities.

And ultimately, it was MacMurray’s affability that made him such a convincing Walter Neff. Walter is not innately a bad person – he’s an everyday insurance man who gets lured into the beautiful Phyllis Dietrichson’s (Barbara Stanwyck) scheme of murdering her husband for the insurance money. Though he gets drawn in deep, committing the act himself, and using his professional knowhow to shoot for the highest potential payout, there’s an undercurrent of self-disgust to MacMurray’s portrayal. Walter doesn’t revel in his violent act. His actions are swiftly laced with regret, and then a grim determination to dig himself out of this self-dug hole as best he can.

Noir is all about doom spirals, one bad decision leading to an inescapable destruction. As Walter scrambles to cover his tracks, he must double cross the one person he loves even more than Phyllis: his boss, and best friend, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson were both scene-stealing actors, and more accustomed to playing in darker registers than their co-star. Double Indemnity gives the two the showiest roles, and they run away with them.

As such, MacMurray’s steady, understated turn often gets unfairly overlooked. Much of his performance simply involves watching: studying the faces of his accomplice and his friend, gauging his next move based on what he thinks they’re thinking. And while Phyllis both starts and ends the movie as a conniving femme fatale, and Keyes remains decent for the duration, Walter goes on a real journey – not just from a regular man to a murderer, but in his physicality, his whole way of being.

He’s palpably heavier once the deed has been done; the insouciant spring has left his step. In his scenes with Robinson, MacMurray has the unenviable task of depicting Walter acting the way that he thinks he was before his whole life turned upside down, and he does it so deftly that it’s easy to overlook the various layers on which he’s operating. Decades later, MacMurray would refer to his experience on Double Indemnity as “the first time I’d been offered a part, which would require, in my mind, acting.” As it turns out, he was pretty darn great at it.

Still, Double Indemnity didn’t change MacMurray’s career completely. He made three more comedies with Claudette Colbert, as well as other jauntily titled fluff like On Our Merry Way (1948), Callaway Went Thataway (1951) and A Millionaire for Christy! (1951). As he aged, he transitioned more into family movies, making mid-century Disney classics The Shaggy Dog (1959) and The Absent Minded Professor (1961). He was, at heart, a light entertainment man.

Nevertheless, it did give him a taste for the darker side, and the resultant films would be among his best. He flexed his fast-talking noir muscles again in Borderline (1950) and Pushover (1954); though neither would approach the grandeur of Double Indemnity, MacMurray’s morally grey leads were convincingly played, and he had good chemistry with his female co-stars (Claire Trevor and Kim Novak). The Caine Mutiny (1954) saw MacMurray’s light and dark sides meld compellingly in his easy-going naval lieutenant, who proves an untrustworthy ally in the fight against Humphrey Bogart’s dictatorial captain.

The best of these later films was again directed by Billy Wilder. While Walter Neff did at least have a moral compass (however skewed), in The Apartment (1960), MacMurray’s HR head Jeff Sheldrake is the human embodiment of corporate soullessness, evincing joviality as he manipulates his poor underlings to his will. As he had 16 years earlier, Wilder subverted MacMurray’s innate affability to ingenious dramatic effect.

It’s somewhat ironic that MacMurray would be best remembered for his acidic work with Wilder when it ran so counter to the cheery roles he played for most of his career, but you know what they say about nice guys finishing last. In showing that even a guy as nice as him could have real darkness within, MacMurray justly, subtly cemented his place in cinema history.