I ended up watching Double Indemnity last night because I received the new Criterion blu-ray in the mail, a birthday present from my mother (to-day is my birthday). It sure is beautiful now.
I remember the trouble I had getting it on DVD for years. Finally, I bought a Chinese bootleg copy which, as you can imagine, was pretty lousy in picture quality. But I was happy to have something and probably watched it a dozen times. Then Universal finally got around to releasing a special edition DVD which was excellent but can't hold a candle to finally getting a blu-ray.
Nowadays, I tend to watch movies thinking about how easy it would be to show to a Japanese acquaintance. I realised this one would be just about impossible. How could a translation truly do justice to the loop-de-loops of colloquialisms in Raymond Chandler's script? Where to begin with a line like the one where Phyllis offers Walter some tea and he's says that'd be fine unless she has "some beer that's not working." You'd have to be aware of the English oddity, "fix a drink".
The dialogue's just filled with stuff like that which the native speaker is just barely able to keep up to. Obviously it's been talked about a lot and it's obviously more stylised than realistic. But I like how it conveys what Walter is trying to do with Phyllis.
All that patter is covert yet obvious. It's so clever it seems meant to be slightly disorienting. He thinks he's toying with her but the whole time he's just painting a picture for her of an opportunity to find an accomplice in her husband's murder.
It's a terrific film, and shot on film so they can continually release higher definition editions. It's one of the good things in life.
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