Razing Cain with Chandler and Wilder: The Prometheus-Pandora Myth inDouble Indemnity

Abstract

During the eight lucrative but unhappy years Raymond Chandler worked as a Hollywood writer, he wrote or cowrote six screenplays which were made into movies. Surprisingly, he was approached to adapt only one of the Philip Marlowe novels which had made him famous. Chandler’s finest screenplay—coauthored with Billy Wilder—was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1936 “roman noir,” Double Indemnity (1944), for Paramount Pictur es. Chandler’s hiring was ironic; it was his first attempt at screenwriting, and he detested Cain’s fiction. In a letter to Alfred Knopf, Chandler—furious over being compared to Cain—launched into a vitriolic attack: But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that? (quoted in MacShane 101) Chandler’s violent distaste for Cain’s novels must have sparked something, however, for his work on Double Indemnity far surpassed anything he was to do thereafter as a scenarist. According to biographer Frank MacShane, Paramount next recruited Chandler to polish the dialogue on two plodding scripts for movies now virtually forgotten: a melodrama, And Now Tomorrow (1944), and an obscure mystery, The Unseen (1945). Both projects exasperated Chandler because their directors, Irving Pichel and Lewis Allen, respectively, omitted so much of the dialogue he had carefully crafted. Chandler based a third, more promising, film, The Blue