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Title: Double Indemnity (Bfi Film Classics) by Richard Schickel ISBN: 0-85170-298-8 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: September, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Good Study of a Great Film
Comment: Overall, Schickel's short monograph on Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a nice piece of work. The information on Wilder's collaboration with the somewhat difficult Raymond Chandler is particularly well researched and well presented. Wilder is, after all, a writer's director, the way that John Ford is a director's director or Sergei Eisenstein, an editor's director. When film critic Andrew Sarris downgraded Wilder in his book THE AMERICAN CINEMA, it is because he could not understand that a director can be an artist while lacking a distinctive visual style. If Wilder's art comes out primarily during the scripting phase of the process, the resulting film can be just as successful -- especially if you have a great veteran like John B. Seitz behind the camera.
And there is no doubt that DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a masterpiece. It is a complex work bringing together Billy Wilder's bemused street smarts, James M. Cain's corrosive venom, and Raymond Chandler's poetic noir dialogue.
My only complaint with this monograph is that Schickel spent very little time on Cain's original novel except to pan it in passing. Granted that Chandler and Wilder improved on the original, the original is still one of the classic noir novels and deserves more than a passing nod.
Secondly, Schickel just mentions in passing an article on screenwriting written by Chandler and doesn't even bother footnoting it. I finally tracked down the article in the second volume of the outstanding Library of America set of Chandler's work (which, by the by, also includes the complete film script for DOUBLE INDEMNITY). Chandler was obviously very down on screenwriting. Like many writers, he assumed that the script was THE key element of the film, and that writers should be treated with greater deference. After reading it, I still think the world of Chandler, but I feel all the more respect for Wilder for how he handled his somewhat cranky associate.
Rating: 4
Summary: First class piece of film criticism
Comment: Schickel is a first class film critic and has given an excellent introduction to the Wilder classic Double Indemnity. In may opinion it is the best so far of the BFI series.
Rating: 5
Summary: Superb, well-researched study of noir classic
Comment: Double Indemnity is perhaps the best film noir of all; and this is perhaps the best volume in the entire BFI series of monographs on classic (and modern classic) films. Schickel's study includes the usual (for the series) personal appreciation of the film and the way it helped create the genre (Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane set the tone and the look; Double Indemnity contributed the central iconic character of noir, the two-timing blonde, and it wasn't until she was added to the mix that the genre took off). But it's also a solid job of research, detailing the work process of Wilder and his often-frustrated collaborator Raymond Chandler, the way in which they turned Cain's prose into speakable dialogue (in the process improving almost every aspect of the original), and most intriguing of all, outlining the film's original ending, in which death in the electric chair paid off the theme of mechanized people in a mechanized society riding an assembly line to doom.
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Title: The Big Sleep (Bfi Film Classics) by David Thomson ISBN: 0851706320 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Chinatown (B.F.I. Film Classics) by Michael Eaton ISBN: 0851705324 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: L.A. Confidential (BFI Modern Classics) by Manohla Dargis ISBN: 0851709443 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 05 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Blade Runner (Bfi Modern Classics) by Scott Bukatman ISBN: 0851706231 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Big Heat (Bfi Film Classics) by Colin McArthur ISBN: 0851703429 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: January, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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