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Barbara Stanwyck read the script for Double Indemnity in a state of agitation. It was good. But the part was bilious and cruel. The moment she finished she called on Billy Wilder, its co-author, in his West Hollywood office. “I love the script and I love you,” she explained, “but I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer.” Wilder could not abide diffidence, and, though he had not yet directed a feature, he was already rather notorious for his indelicate manner — just a few weeks earlier he’d hurled a manuscript at Raymond Chandler’s head. He stood and looked Stanwyck in the eye. “Well,” he challenged, “are you a mouse or an actress?” Stanwyck said she hoped she was the latter. Wilder sat back down. “Then do the part.”

And so she did. In Double Indemnity, Stanwyck plays Phyllis Dietrichson, a beguiling femme fatale in the heart of Los Angeles who persuades a hapless insurance salesman, played by Fred MacMurray, to help murder her husband. As in the novel by James M. Cain, Phyllis is a fiend with an irresistible figure, as callous as she is sultry — a psychopath with “a shape to set a man nuts,” in Cain’s evocative description. And Stanwyck, gaudily bedizened in a curly blonde wig and ridiculous sunglasses, seems exaggerated to the scale of myth or archetype. (“I wanted her to look as sleazy as possible,” Wilder later recalled.) In 1943, when she offered the role, Stanwyck demurred. But it was hardly as though Wilder was casting against type: by that time the much-beloved firebrand had spent a decade perfecting the part of the villainess, having played with memorable vigor all manner of cheats, tramps and deceivers. You might even call guile her specialty.