We meet again, 1SO! My third and likely final installment in your film club...
Double Indemnity (1944)
A film noir classic, I understand. I've found my reading around the film, including a few reviews, quite interesting. When audiences weren't buying anymore "happily ever after," we got Walter Neff, the ultimate patsy in a grand insurance scheme that pays-off for nobody. I dig the storytelling via flashbacks just before Neff is ultimately caught. I'm not a huge fan of the acting style, as it's quite melodramatic, even if everyone here is fairly black at heart. It's a hang-up I have with a fair few works of classic cinema, either that I've caught on TV, sitting with my grandparents*, or engaging in discovery missions such as this one, as I find the acting a little more artificial and prefer something a bit more natural, i.e. with verbal or non-verbal pauses, faux pas, more subtle changes of expression and tone of voice. Overall, I think it's a very neat film, edited in fairly direct and coherent manner, and any surprises could be found in the twists of the plot. I'm trying and likely failing with words to get at a look that seems rather standard for a film that mostly consists of people talking in living rooms, the camera often still, close-ups that serve the melodramatic aspects of the film, while there are obviously some of the dark hues of film noir (still a lot happening at night, after hours, where the plotting really gets going). For someone who quite likes film noir, even if I haven't seen a wide variety of it (had a lecture series on Chinatown in college, which I loved), this is a good gap to fill in, although I'm not particularly enthusiastic about its overall look or acting.
*My grandparents really got me into cinema. On my mom's side, they would often be watching classic films, always took me to the cinema, and when I tired of all else, they let me rent The Neverending Story (VHS) as often as I wanted to. I don't know why they didn't just buy a copy. On my Dad's side, well...The Sound of Music and the little corner store with 50 titles for rent, hardly any of them new. I get a pang of nostalgia just thinking about it.