THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1950)

While top producer Hal B. Wallis had yet to leave Warner Brothers for his own unit at Paramount when DOUBLE INDEMNITY came out in 1944, he must have thought, ‘I want one of those,’ biding his time till this reasonable facsimile was published.*  Worth the wait, and though the film has a sticky time getting up & running, initial awkwardness is neatly explained by the end.  Barbara Stanwyck, the direct link between the two films, loses the blonde horror on her head from the earlier film (it’s briefly seen in a photo), and is once more looking at a big inheritance if the right person dies, once more romancing a dumb guy who thinks he’s smart (dull Wendell Corey in for dull Fred MacMurray, each cleverly used for their dullness), once more waylaid by her lover’s boss (here D.A. Paul Kelly, not a patch on Edward G. Robinson’s thirsty insurance investigator).  But if the twisty plot and characterizations are a bit off INDEMNITY’s high water mark, the layout is tip-top with present-at-creation film noir man Robert Siodmak plotting set pieces of uncommon suspense.  (A mid-point tour de force has Stanwyck & Corey ‘arranging’ the house to fit their story before the butler shows up and discovers the body.)  And if Victor Young proves he’s no Miklós Rózsa on noirish music cues, glam cinematographer George Barnes goes to town with the shadows and frames-within-frames of the genre.  Unexpectedly satisfying.

DOUBLE-BILL/READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Hal Wallis, from his tight-lipped auto-bio, STARMAKER, ‘Very consciously, I made a series of melodramatic films with strong characters and situations, films that proved to be extremely popular.  Movie going audiences had matured during the war and no longer required false and sentimental portraits of human nature. . . . SO EVIL MY LOVE, THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON, and SORRY WRONG NUMBER.  In every case, the motive for destruction was greed . . . We made no attempt to glamorize, excuse, or deify villains.  We explained them, that was all.’  Nice having Hal Wallis select our Double-Bills!