(Double Indemnity) From the Moment They Met: Dick Powell and Joan Blondell

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. From real crime to serial to novel to movie, the history of Double Indemnity is as complex as the plot of any to hit the screen during film noir’s classic period. Born of a true crime that inspired reporter and would-be crime writer James M. Cain’s novella, Hollywood bid on the rights but throughout the 1930s a strict code of censorship made certain that no studio could green-light a murder melodrama based on real events. Then World War II loosened some strictures, and director-writer Billy Wilder—before his prime as director of sparkling comedies—could hire hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler and revamp the story enough to pass the censors. Wilder then lined up a star cast led by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck in her unforgettable turn as the ultimate femme fatale, alongside Fred MacMurray, cast against type as her partner in crime. Wilder’s film became one of the earliest studio noirs to gain critical and commercial success (nominated for 7 Oscars!), to influence the entire noir movement, and to impact filmmakers to this day. Authors Alain Silver and James Ursini tell the complete history of Double Indemnity in their latest work on film noir: From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir (March 26, 2024) Source: www.amazon.com

“Okay Marlowe,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re a tough guy. You’ve been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you’re crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let’s see you do something really tough – like putting your pants on.’” Murder, My Sweet is the first of the film noirs, though The Maltese Falcon (1941) is considered by some film critics to be the first film noir, the visual and thematic sensibilities were not fully established till 1944, when this film, along with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Otto Preminger’s Laura were released (all of them in 1944). Among these three, it’s Murder, My Sweet that fully adheres to the low-budget, and a little unrefined, hard-on-the-edges aesthetics of a classic film Noir; both Laura and Double Indemnity were big budget, highly sophisticated, big studio films made by A list directors with glossy production values. There is a reason why the film Noir mainly originated, and remained the mainstay of RKO studios. 

Dick Powell’s background in romantic musicals gives him access to a far deeper emotional range, needed to play the complex, conflicted and a very vulnerable Marlowe; his cynicism, his humor, his loyalty to his code… it’s all there. Powell manages to give extra resonance to some of Chandler’s throw-away similes, thanks to his comedic talent, and he is particularly good at delivering those self-mocking, sardonic lines. No wonder Dick Powell claimed Philip Marlowe as his favorite role. Beyond that, this was a career-defining one, as after that, Powell would be known as the quintessential Noir hero, with further ventures into Noir territory, like the fantastic “Pitfall” and “Cornered”. On a tight budget, Dmytryk and Harry Wild (who'd worked on Citizen Kane) manage to infuse the film with all the seedy, chaotic topography that would become the hallmark of Noir thrillers. Dmytryk always insisted that Powell’s version was the closest to Chandler’s Marlowe, because Marlowe is not a savvy, super-sleuth like Sam Spade, which Bogart played very well; but Marlowe is more of an “eagle scout”, and that’s how Powell plays it. Then again, The Big Sleep was not exactly a Chandler movie; it was through and through a Howard Hawks movie, and Hawks always makes Hawks pictures, no matter what the genre and who the original author. Source: manksjoint.home.blog

I‘ve always thought Dick Powell, the first screen Philip Marlowe, was also the best. Director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter  John Paxton and producer Adrian Scott managed to captured the essence of  Chandler that proved so elusive in so many other adaptations. Powell was turned down by Billy Wilder for the lead in Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944) but Powell nabbed the role of Marlowe in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet, now considered a film noir classic, and never looked back. William K. Everson, in The Detective in Film, suggests that “Powell — because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it — became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart in The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946)], who had several other competing images working against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, and Rick from Casablanca. 

Dick Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks with superbly underplayed style.” By the time The Big Sleep was released, after numerous rewrites, Chandler’s dark existential stroll down the mean streets seen through the eyes of a world-weary detective had turned into a L.A. sexy romp, following a P.I. who spent much of his time flirting with man-hungry females. Even Bogart conceded in private: "You, sir, made a real good Marlowe."

Marlowe made his television debut in 1954, played by Dick Powell (who else?), in a live adaptation of The Long Goodbye that served as the premiere episode of the anthology series CLIMAX! Powell had, of course, played Marlowe ten years on the big screen, earlier in RKO’s Murder, My Sweet. By most accounts, it was generally a very good production, and was even featured on that week’s TV Guide cover, with a close-up of Powell as Marlowe in a clench with co-star Teresa Wright. But the live telecast is probably best known for the scene in which actor Tris Coffin, whose character had just died, gets up and walks away. Apparently Coffin thought he was out of camera range. He wasn’t. Unfortunately any recordings of the live episode have long since disappeared. Or been destroyed? Source: https://thrillingdetective.com

 

In West of Sunset (2014), novelist Stewart O' Nan imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years, which he spent in Hollywood. The book opens in 1937 in North Carolina, where Fitzgerald is "just eking out a living", deeply indebt to his agent Harold Ober, "but he sees a chance to get out of debt by going to Hollywood and he seizes it." Sometimes, Fitzgerald thought Hollywood was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. Grudgingly, he retraced his route to the studio and spent the afternoon restoring a scene that had been gutted. On the lot, before he punched clock, he stopped by the newsstand and scanned Sheilah's column. Among the casting rumors and studio press releases was a tidbit about Dick Powell and June Allyson getting cozy in a booth at the Victor Hugo restaurant, a Los Angeles landmark that had been relocated at 233 N. Beverly Hills Drive in 1934, designed by architect Claude Beelman in a Beaux-Arts Deco style. 

He told himself he had no right to be jealous, but Dick Powell seemed to have all the things Scott craved: self-confidence, all-American charm and a magnificent singing voice. Suddenly he went back to the past, thinking of his fascination with Lois Moran, already a star at seventeen, a sweet, clever kid whose mother traveled everywhere with her. Moran had starred in West of Broadway, a 1931 American pre-Code drama. Co-stars Lois Moran and Madge Evans said to Scott they swooned over Dick Powell too, much to his dismay. In 1934, Dick Powell was on the list of the top 10 movie stars of the year. Madge Evans and Fred MacMurray had starred in Men Without Names (1935), a crime film directed by Ralph Murphy at Paramount Pictures. In York Village, Maine, on July 25, 1939, Evans married playwright Sidney Kingsley, best known for his plays Dead End (with Bogart and Claire Trevor) and Detective Story. The couple owned a 250-acre estate in Oakland, New Jersey. Following her marriage to Kingsley, Evans left Hollywood and moved to this home in New Jersey, but before that she'd bid farewell to Scott, introducing him to Mary Brian. 

Scott and Lois Moran had double dates with Dick Powell and Mary Brian. However, Powell worked so many hours in company of Joan Blondell, it seemed inevitable for the Warners lot they would end up together. Sad fact is Mary Brian had even met and received approval from Powell's father for future nuptials. In 1935, despite still being married to George Barnes, Joan Blondell had insinuated into Powell's life, which led him to break up with Mary for good. Blondell, according to the jilted Mary, was "a man-eater, a dame in the worst sense." 

   

Excerpt from a Fox Movietone News newsreel from 1936. "The Hollywood Spotlight reports on the marriage of Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and on Shirley Temple receiving a Shetland pony as a gift from 20th Century Fox chairman Joseph Schenck." Powell and Blondell first started dating in September 1935 and they got married on September 19, 1936. Their wedding took place on the yacht ‘Santa Paula’ at San Pedro. The docks were filled with fans. Joan's sister Gloria was maid of honor, actor Regis Toomey was the best man. An article published by Radio Stars magazine appeared in January, 1937 (by George T. Delacorte) recounting Dick Powell and Joan Blondell's not so successful honeymoon in September 1936, coinciding with the release of Stage Struck directed by Busby Berkeley: 

"They were, a mile up towards the sky, in the tower of one of New York's smartest hotels. It was their honeymoon and yet neither of them looked particularly happy. Joan Blondell looked almost defiant as she stood against the wall in the slim black satin dress that made a white camelia of her face and brought out the gold in the topsy-turvy halo of her hair. Her blue eyes, the color of the lupines that grow along the California countryside, looked steadily at the opposite wall in something that might have been resentment and something that might have been despair. And Dick Powell, laid low with a bad attack of the flu, watched her from the bed on which he was lying, his eyes seeming all the more gentle for the storm that was gathering in hers. Somehow you knew that he felt the things she was feeling, too, but had put them away from him in his concern for her. No doubt of Dick Powell's love for Joan when he looked at her like that, almost as if you could hear him saying: "Don't let it bother you, kid. Don't ever let anything bother you again." That was the feeling you had about the two of them. Suddenly and without warning, as people will when they have been thoroughly disillusioned. They must have met disillusion before. After all, they both had gone through an unsuccessful first marriage, they both had taken love and seen it turn to ashes in their hands. But there's another kind of disillusion that can warp and change a whole life, if a man or woman isn't equal to combatting it. A disillusion that knows neither dignity, nor pride, nor honor, that is made up of ridicule and unkind laughter. That's the kind Joan Blondell and Dick Powell were to know at a time that should have been the happiest in their lives. 

They were so happy, these two, back in Hollywood. This new love that had come to them was so different from anything they had known before. Joan was besotted with Dick when she'd heard about a boy who had failed in a radio audition because of technical flaws in his untrained voice and how Dick was paying for singing lessons for that boy, who might conceivably be his own rival some day. Giving him more than that, for Dick was coaching him himself, giving him all the pointers most professionals guard so jealously from others. But it was only after trouble came to Joan in her first marriage that they really became friends. Dick, always so vulnerable where other people's unhappiness is concerned, felt drawn to Joan. The joyous, carefree girl he had known was changing there before his eyes. He saw her creep into her dressing-room between scenes and, for all the lavish make-up she had on when she came to the set again, he saw the traces of the tears she could not wholly remove. He heard that ready tongue of hers stilled and missed the laughter that had always come so spontaneously before. And he decided that Joan would become happy again with him. They would have liked to have run down the gangplank, if they had been unimportant honeymooners, and get into a taxi and hold hands on the way to their hotel. But they knew they couldn't. After all, they weren't unimportant. People wanted to know all about them. 

So they met that crowd of newspapermen as cordially as two well-bred people will meet anyone. And Joan saw to it that long tables were set up in the drawing-room of their suite, with scrambled eggs and crisp bacon and tantalizing sausages and thin buttered toast and plenty of coffee for those who wanted breakfast, and with sandwiches and Scotch and soda and champagne for those that didn't. And she and Dick met their questions and tried not to mind their indiscreet attitudes. Later that evening they read the papers. The papers stunned them! Those newspapermen, whom they had treated as guests, had had a marvelous time with them! Joan and Dick were splashed all over the front pages of the New York papers like a three-ring circus. Paragraphs jeered at them in cutting ridicule. The love that had come to them, the sweetness they had known, was mocked at. They hadn't been human beings to those reporters. They had been just movie stars. They had been a movie crooner and his blonde bride. A strange couple to be torn into little pieces for the mirth of newspaper readers. Joan and Dick must have been so humiliated they couldn't even meet each other's eyes when they read those papers. Couldn't talk about it even to each other, in those first awful moments. After that, it wasn't fun to see those plays they had looked forward to so eagerly, with everybody craning their necks to see them and the memory of those ridiculing words still burning in their minds, so that they thought even friendly admiration was mockery. 

It wasn't fun to walk down Fifth Avenue, either, or to go into all the smart shops, feeling that the girl behind the counter was remembering those stories, too, and laughing at them. Dick became ill up there in that grand honeymoon suite of theirs and somehow all the bitterness Joan had managed to conceal before couldn't be concealed any longer. She was mad. Fighting mad. Ready to fight the whole world because she had been hurt. And she felt Dick couldn't console her enough. So she stood there defiantly beside his bed and said in a small tense voice: "What is there to say about our romance? We're married, aren't we? Why do people usually get married? Well, that's the reason for our getting married, too. We're no different from anybody else." And somehow in her hurt and bewilderment she couldn't bring herself to say the word "love." —Radio Stars magazine, January 1937

I said: “Well, let’s get on that boat. Soon you’ll have over two hundred intimates with Big Fancy Names waiting to inhale the reception champagne—not to mention Pathé News Reel, Fox Movietone News, Paramount Sound News, and the ever present Sheely Dawson.” On the deck Jim was checking our baggage while I was dressing to face the newsreel cameras and reporters who were meeting the ship an hour before docking time. Jim pushed open the door, slammed it, and stood there, apparently stunned. “The Captain has received word that close to one hundred tugboats are going to surround the Santa Paula as we enter the harbor, and airplanes will be overhead trailing banners!” “Jim? If those are putting out here to interview us, we ought to have coffee, toasts, pastries—and some drinks—to warm them.” “That costs good money,” Jim grumbled. “It’s freezing out, honey, and they must have gotten up at daybreak. We really should do it.” I smiled my Sunday best and won. When the buffet table was set up by the pleased steward and two waiters, Jim smiled and said: “You’re so extravagant,” looking at the laden table. Then Jim put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sure glad we didn’t do it the last few nights—your eyes would look glassy now.” “Glassy?” “From doing it too much.” He gave me a playful whack on the behind. “What did I get into?” I wondered. The fancy food, and particularly the drinks, gratified the frozen ladies and gentlemen of the press. Even so, I sensed a slight boredom with their “Movie Star” assignment, and a tinge of sarcasm in their questions. “You two thrilled with each other?” was one of their goodies. 

Jim smiled broadly and clasped his hands over his head like a fighter acknowledging the crowd. The reporters looked at me. “Yes, indeedy,” I said, feeling like a simpering idiot. What could I say? That Jim did not want me in any of my divine, custom-made bathing suits until the bruise on my upper thigh had disappeared completely? (I had bumped into a wrought-iron table while playing with Jamie.) “People will say I did some weird sex thing to you, and I can’t have that,” Jim told me. He wouldn’t let me go into the sunlight early “because people will think we don’t like doing what newlyweds are supposed to do.” On the Super Chief, Hollywood bound, I locked the door to our drawing room and hugged Jim. “Oh, honey, isn’t it great? Three days, four nights of quietness—just us. Get into your p.j.’s, and I’ll get into my nightie, and we’ll have dinner in here and recap the crazy...” He interrupted me. “What will the waiter think if we’re practically stripped when he takes our dinner order?” “He’ll steam with envy,” I smiled as I removed his shirt and tie and ruffled his hair. I think that night Jim had drunk more than usual, and maybe that was the reason he felt so ardent. 

I didn't recognize him. He jumped on bed withouth much ballyhoo and undressed me hastily. Then it was hours of "God, baby, come with me," with a hoarse, almost desperate tone, which was quite different from his typical soft tryst he considered more romantic and appropriate. I thought "you better keep this night etched in your mind, girl," certain about the odds of it happening again were zilch. When we finished this rare long session, his brain returned to schedule, and Jim reshowed, regargled, recombed his hair, rearranged his pajama collar, and continued studying the income-tax reports. Seven years later, when we were in our early process of separation, I saw Jim standing in front of a camera mee-moo-mauing while the makeup man tried to apply powder on his nose. “All right, everybody, we shoot,” called the director. It was a long dolly shot. As Jim sang, the camera pulled back, and then I saw a young girl with a pink babushka tied under her chin, perched on the camera stand below the lens. Her hands were clasped prayerfully as she gazed with worship at Jim. In all my years in pictures, through all the years of Busby Berkeley shoots, I never saw anyone sit there before. I turned to a member of the crew standing next to me. 

“Who’s that sitting on the camera, Bill?” “Amy O’Brien.” He paused. “She’s some kind of a nut.” After the take Jim called to me, “One still, and I’ll be right with you, Nora.” Then added: “Everyone knows my wife Nora, this is Amy O’Brien.” Halfway through my “How-do-ya-do,” Amy clapped both hands over her mouth as if terrified, and ran off the stage. “What was that bit with Amy O’Brien?” I asked after we had ordered our lunch. “She's a new actress,” Jim answered, saluting Joe Schenck as he passed our table. “Hey, Jim—who calls you ‘James?” I asked. He looked up from his dinner plate, startled. “I’ve gotten a dozen phone calls in the last couple of months. The voice is always the same, and so is the conversation—or lack of it. ‘James?’ it says hopefully when I answer. ‘James who?’ I ask. An ‘Oh-oh,’ or ’Sorry,’ is muttered, then she hangs up.” “I have no idea,” Jim answered, tackling his salad. “A crank or a fan.” “But you’re ‘Jim,’ not ‘James’—world-famous Jim—and we have a very unlisted phone number.” “I don’t know,” he snapped, visibly nervous. I sought the hotel cocktail lounge. I seated myself on a stool at the end of the empty bar. “You’re Nora Marten!” the bartender pointed his index finger at me. I nodded. “Please give me something that will settle a thumping stomach.”  

“You’re Nora Marten!” he crowed again. I nodded. “How about a sherry for what ails you?” he advised excitedly. “Sounds okay.” He poured me the sherry and leaned over the bar close to my face. “Don’t tell me a movie star’s got problems.” I grinned vacuously and picked up the glass. He showered me with questions as I sipped. I pantomimed my answers. “How does it feel to be a movie star?” Shrug. “You know Jimmy Cagney?” Nod. “Humphrey Bogart?” Nod. “Dick Powell?” Nod. “Errol Flynn?” Nod. “Edward G. Robinson?” Nod. “Clark Gable?” Nod. “Jesus Christ!” he said admiringly. I nodded for that, too. “I wanted to get in show business,” he informed me as I finished my drink, “but it’s tough.” I agreed with him. —Center Door Fancy (1972) by Joan Blondell