Plot Points - Double Indemnity (1943)

(Text mostly from Wikipedia)

OPENING SHOT: Downtown Los Angeles, dark, foggy and ominous, after midnight. Spooky downtown. A car is driving like crazy, passing through GO lights (film being B&W).

SET-UP, BACKGROUND & INTRODUCTION OF MAIN CHARACTERS: Walter Neff (MacMurray), a successful insurance salesman for Pacific All-Risk, returns to his office building in downtown Los Angeles late one night and something is obviously very wrong. Neff, clearly in pain, sits down at his desk and starts to tell the whole story into a dictaphone, for his colleague Barton Keyes (Robinson), a claims adjuster.

Neff meets the sultry Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) during a routine house call to renew an automobile insurance policy for her husband. A flirtation develops, at least until Neff hears Phyllis wonder how she could take out a policy on her husband's life without him knowing it.

INCITING INCIDENT – CATALYST: Neff knows she means murder and wants no part of it. But the bad seed is planted.

DEBATE – ANTI-HERO VASCILLATES: Phyllis pursues Neff to his own home, though, and persuades him to that the two of them, together, should kill her husband. Neff knows all the tricks of his trade and comes up with a plan in which Phyllis's husband will die an unlikely death, in this case being thrown from a train. Pacific All-Risk will therefore be required, by the "double indemnity" clause in the insurance policy, to pay the widow twice the normal amount.

“FUN AND GAMES”: Neff and Phyllis carry out their plan, but Neff is seen by a Mr. Jackson from Oregon. Uh-oh. We have a witness now, although the guy could not see Neff’s face on the dark train.

B STORY (LOLA) THAT INTERSECTS WITH THE A STORY: Lola and Neff. Neff tries to keep her happy so she won’t share her suspicion with the cops that her father did not commit “suicide.”

MID POINT: Keyes, a tenacious investigator, does not suspect foul play at first, but eventually concludes that the Dietrichson woman and an unknown accomplice must be behind the husband's death. He has no reason, however, to be suspicious of Neff, someone he has worked with for quite some time and admires.

KEYES CLOSES IN on NEFF by statistically proving that “suicide” by jumping out of train that went at 15 mph does not happen and it does not make sense. Also, why did MR. Dietrichson did not apply for insurance when he broke his foot? Perhaps he wasn’t aware that he had life insurance? He also interviews Mr. Jackson in Neff’s presence – tension deepens. Neff is constantly scared that he’ll be seen together with Phyllis in public.

B STORY (LOLA) INTERSECTS WITH THE A STORY: Neff is not only worried about Keyes. The victim's daughter, Lola (Jean Heather), comes to him convinced that her stepmother, Phyllis, is behind her father's death because Lola's mother also died under suspicious circumstances when Phyllis was her nurse.

ALL IS LOST: Once he realizes that Phyllis is playing him for a sap and also seeing another man – Lola's boyfriend – behind his back, Neff believes the only way out is to murder Phyllis himself.

ACT 3: But she has had the same thought; when they meet, she shoots him first. Neff, badly hurt, is still able to shoot and kill her.

FINALE: Neff then drives to his office. There he dictates his full confession to Keyes, who arrives in person just in time to hear the last of the gory details and see his dying friend Neff collapse to the floor.

Anti-hero exonerates and almost redeems himself by his confession -- although he tried to run to Mexico but he collapsed on the way out of the office due to his gunshot wound.

FINAL IMAGE: Keyes lights the wounded-Neff’s cigarette and uses one of Neff’s lines: “I love you too.”

Free Tools from Blake Snyder

In the days ahead I'll have a lot to say about Blake Snyder and his SAVE THE CAT approach to screenplay writing.

How do you argue with a very nice guy who has sold dozens of scripts and is a working screenplay writer? I have a feeling these days he is in the process of retiring from active writing to coaching and lecturing but his "beat sheet" basically corroborates everything I've read and experienced so far in terms of screenplays that work.

I highly recommend both his books and also these freebies:



FREE TOOLS by Blake Snyder:

Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies At-A-Glance
The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet
Wedding Crashers Beat Sheet
Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis
Tips on Writing Horror
Tips on Writing Horror

How to Make Your Hero Sympatico?

It's important to make sure people can identify with your hero and like him/her even if he/she is a trained killer.

Example: BOURNE SUPREMACY.

Jason Bourne flies over a bridge with his Jeep when they are chased and hit by a contract killer.

His girlfriend is shot in the head and is dying under water. Bourne makes a huge effort to extract the bleeding woman out of the sinking vehicle and then...

he does a mouth-to-mouth and pushes air out of his lungs into hers!

A picture that's worth a thousand words. Instead of getting busy to save his own life, he is risking suffocation in order to save the life of another.

A perfect "Save the Cat" moment, to use a phrase made famous by script guru Blake Snyder.

Now if you can't love a guy who does that to save his girlfriend I don't know what would it take.

Movie Review - High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku) (1963)

A police procedural with a moral center. An ethical dilemma wrapped up inside a crime story, by the indisputable Japanese master director Akira Kurosawa (Ran, Rashomon, Seven Samurai).

A well-shot black and white movie with the usual sub-par production values common to the movies made in the ‘50s and ‘60s. (But let’s also add that perhaps it’s unfair to compare the movie making technology of a past century with what is available today, in the 21st.)

Gondo (brought to life with an unrelenting machismo by Toshiro Mifune) is the hard-charging fiery CEO of a women’s shoe company who refuses to go along with a new crop of directors who want to produce cheaper shoes for the masses.

INCITING INCIDENT: Gondo insists on high-quality even if it means higher prices. The other senior officials of the National Shoe corporation make it clear that it’s going to be either them -- or Gondo.

One way Gondo can resist the corporate attack on his life’s work is to buy enough shares to give him an upper hand in the control of the company.

PLOT POINT 1: Just as he is about to borrow the millions necessary to buy back some shares, his son is kidnapped by a ransom artist.

Gondo is devastated because the only way he can save his son’s life is to ruin his life-time work since paying the ransom would be the end of his attempt to buy more shares.

Writers notice: this is a real DILEMMA at work. Two equally nasty and equally strong choices with significant opposite results that we care for.

However, soon Gondo is faced with another ethical dilemma: the kid who is kidnapped is not actually his own but that of his driver whose son was mistaken for Gondo’s.

Now what? Is he going to refuse to pay because the life in question belongs to his driver's son rather than his own? Would he be able to save face if he refuses to save the son of an employee? If he does that, how is he going to command the respect of anyone in the world?

Yet, if he pays the ransom he’ll be practically bankrupt, with no prospects of maintaining control over the company and thus resist the take-over attempt of his bitter rivals. In worldly terms, he'd be ruined.

At the end Gondo agrees to pay the ransom.

MIDPOINT: At this point the film switches tracks and proceeds as a police procedural. The detailed look into the ‘60s technology of tracking criminals by the Japanese cops is fascinating.

It’s also amazing for the way Kurosawa reveals (or, "idealizes"?) the chummy relationship between the press, the cops and the corporations. The kind of "corporatist" concern for the “poor Gondo” and the millions he has paid for the kidnapper is unthinkable in modern-day America. It portrays a very simplistic paradigm of "Criminals" vs. "The Rest of The Society" that is a bit scary if it's also a true portrayal of the Japanese society.

The film ends on an upbeat note, with justice served. The last face-off scene between Gondo and the kidnapper just before he is executed is a let down and an unnecessary piece of "on the nose" exposition after two-hours of high-energy sleuthing and ethical soul wrangling. But overall it’s a watchable movie with a lot of chain-smoking men making all the decisions in an obviously patriarchal Japan of the ‘60s. Unless you are a feminist, you might enjoy this film with great B&W cinematography.

Movie Review - The Unfaithful Wife (1969)

Another great Claude Chabrol thriller with unusual psychological wisdom.

Lead roles are shared by three Chabrol regulars: Stéphane Audran (who was Chabrol's wife in real life and played the unfaithful wife Hélène Desvallées), Michel Bouquet (playing conflicted Charles Desvallees), and Michel Duchaussoy (as Police Officer Duval).

A cautionary tale for anyone who's foolish enough to bed a married woman and then expect both the husband and wife to take it "in stride"... sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't. And the payback can be hard.

This is a film in which both the camera and the music are also characters by themselves. Take the prominent camera moves and music away, and it would not be the same film at all.

I especially loved the way at the end this married couple prefer to share the guilt and choose denial and conspiracy over truth and justice. You would not expect that from a character played by Michel Bouquet who usually excels in playing a law officer in a crime story of this kind.

A French movie with a typical American-Indy flavor in terms of showing us a new and controversial angle of human nature rather than affirming popular values and beliefs about justice. That is the domain of block busters and action-hero flicks of course.

Plot Points – Rear Window (1954)

An Alfred Hitchcock classic thriller starring Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly and Raymond Burr.

Written by John Michael Hayes from a short story by Cornell Woolrich.

INCITING INCIDENT: L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), a photographer who is stuck at home due to a broken leg and who watches his neighbors with a binocular, notices his neighbor across the street (a salesman by the name of Lars Thorwald) involved in a "suspicious activity." To top it off, the salesman's wife also seems to be missing.

PLOT POINT 1: Thorwald has a heavy crate removed from his apartment. His wife is still nowhere to be seen.

MID POINT: Jeffries's girlfriend Lisa sneaks into Thorwald's apartment but she is caught when he returns home unannounced. Thorwald discovers Jeffries is watching him across the courtyard.

PLOT POINT 2: Thorwald pays a scary visit to Jeffries. The two start to fight.

THIRD ACT RESOLUTION: Thorwald confesses murdering his wife and the cops arrest him. Jeffries breaks his other leg too while trying to survive Thorwald's assault.

RECURRING THEME: In this Hitchcock film, the protagonist (Jeffries) dangles for dear life from a window ledge. In most Hitchcock movies a major character dangles dangerously either from a window, a roof (To Catch a Thief), or a natural object (North by Northwest), or the whole film is built around the fear of heights (Vertigo).

Movie Review - Bishop's Wife (1957)

BISHOP’S WIFE turned out to be the opposite of everything that I thought the title implied.

Honestly, I thought this would be a movie in which Cary Grant character would be falling in love with a “bishop’s wife” and creating untold complications along the way. Not quite.

In this very romantic “Christmas film” directed by Henry Koster, Cary Grant actually plays Dudley, an angel on earth and a creature far removed from carnal desires and preoccupations. He materializes as a response to the deepest prayers of the episcopal Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) who begs for some divine guidance to solve his vexing problem and perhaps he gets more guidance than he ever wished for.

Bishop Brougham’s problem is a self-created one — and isn’t that the case for most of our problems anyway? The Bishop is determined to build a cathedral but he is far short of the money required to start and finish the imposing edifice.

One wealthy widow who could help him is Mrs. Hamilton (Gladys Cooper), a super rich matron living in a marble mansion as opulent as a national museum. However, the hard-as-nails Mrs. Hamilton would give the money if and only if her late husband is immortalized by a gilded and oversized inscription at the cathedral and a portrayal of his likeness on a glass window, him posing as St. George.

Descending to earth just before Christmas, on a snowy night filled with good cheer and Christmas carols, angel Dudley helps a blind man cross the street by stopping the oncoming cars mysteriously within inches of hitting them.

He helps everyone he meets in unexpected ways. After Dudley shares the amazing story of an ancient Roman coin with a non-believer professor who gave it to the Bishop as a worthless piece, the aging academic starts writing the history book of his life.

Dudley helps Bishop’s wife Julia (Loretta Young) lighten up and start enjoying life without pretense. He even teaches the taxi cab driver Sylvester how to pick up ice skating and welcome such unexpected moment of recreation.

Soon Dudley becomes friends with and a source of inspiration for everyone in Bishop’s household, including the maids, Bishop’s assistant and his little girl – except, that is, Bishop himself.

Bishop has initially even doubts believing that Dudley is a real angel. But after a visually arresting scene at the library, a scene that involves opening and closing of the entrance door, Bishop is stunned by the unequivocal realization that, yes, Dudley is indeed an angel.

Yet the sour and somber Bishop still cares more about his grandiose plans to build a cathedral than opening his heart to the love and adoration of his wife and others around him. He is scared that the angel is there not to help but to steal his wife and perhaps his job as well. That is, although a pure man of God, Bishop is the last one to enjoy the fruits of this miraculous response to his own prayers.

In a climatic scene, Dudley manages to thaw the ice sheath around Mrs. Hamilton’s heart and transform her from a cold woman who cares only about the pride of her family legacy to a genuinely warm and repentant woman who decides to donate her wealth not to build a cathedral but to feed the poor and tend to their needs.

Christmas night arrives and the Bishop wants Dudley to get out of his life for good. Film ends with Bishop delivering not the sermon he had prepared for the occasion but the one Dudley had the typewriter wrote automatically after sending Bishop’s assistant to her home early on Christmas Eve.

As the Christmas night sermon at the church envelopes the parishioners (including the non-believer Professor) with its magic, Dudley walks away in the snow, leaving behind a world in which a lot of people have realized the love that they were missing in their lives and appreciated the value of immaterial things like courage, joy and compassion.

A very delightful film with a few tear-jerker scenes where you’d better have your handkerchief or box of Kleenexes somewhere close by. The ever-handsome Grant proves that he can be as captivating playing an angel as when he is playing a cat burglar (To Catch a Thief), a CIA agent (Notorious) or a submarine captain (Operation Petticoat).

An 8 out of 10.

OTHER NOTES:

> The ingenius “non-trailer trailer” that comes with the DVD is a smart delightful surprise you should not miss.

> Written by Leonardo Bercovici and Robert E. Sherwood

> Originally David Niven was going to play the angel and Grant the Bishop. Upon Grant’s suggestion, the two male leads switched roles before the shooting began.