Daily Dialogue — January 9, 2018

“It was mid-afternoon, and it’s funny, I can still remember the smell of
honeysuckle all along that block. I felt like a million. There was no way in all this world I could have known that murder sometimes can smell like honeysuckle…”

— Double Indemnity (1944), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, novel by James M. Cain

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Voice-Over Narration.

Trivia: One day during production Raymond Chandler failed to show up at work and was tracked down at his home; he went through a litany of reasons why he could no longer work with director Billy Wilder. ‘Mr. Wilder frequently interrupts our work to take phone calls from women” . . . “ Mr. Wilder ordered me to open up the window. He did not say please” . . . “He sticks his baton in my eyes” . . . “I can’t work with a man who wears a hat in the office. I feel he is about to leave momentarily”. Unless Wilder apologized, Chandler threatened to resign. Wilder surprised himself by apologizing. “It was the first — and probably only — time on record in which a producer and director ate humble pie, in which the screenwriter humiliated the big shots.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: Arguably, the voice-over narration in Double Indemnity was the inspiration — directly or indirectly — for dozens of film noir movies to follow, fueled by the writing of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and the like.