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🦋 Fred MacMurray reading Chandler

MacMurray is just the perfect actor for playing Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. His is the voice I've been hearing all this time whenever I read Chandler. This movie is such a gem! I'm really happy now because I've been operating for a while under the misconception that I had seen all the important movies of film noir -- but I had never even heard of this one, which seems to be an absolutely critical piece of the genre. So presumably there's more stuff out there for me to discover. Nice!

Lots of other great things about this film. The interplay between the different actors absolutely sparkles. It took me a little while to get used to the dialogue, for it not to sound stilted, but once I could get past that it was a lot of fun to follow the twists and turns of what people are saying and what they mean.

posted evening of Saturday, January 24th, 2009
➳ More posts about The Movies

Fred MacMurray: the cheapest man in Hollywood. Cast against type as a nice father in the Disney movies and My Three Sons.

posted morning of January 27th, 2009 by paledave

against type

See, what I was reading was that the casting in Double Indemnity was against type -- that MacMurray was usually cast as a nice guy. It was wild to watch him transform in this movie -- at the beginning he seemed like a pretty decent guy, if hard-boiled -- and albeit, you knew from his voiceover that something was going to go wrong... Watching him get (willingly) corrupted by Stanwyck's influence (who I don't know much of her other work, but apparently she was also being cast against type) was like watching Dr. Jekyll turn into Mr. Hyde.

posted morning of January 27th, 2009 by Jeremy

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