LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Barbara Stanwyck: Indemnity
built 660 days ago
Upgrading her image in the 1940s, Barbara landed better scripts. The blue-collar days were over, but she remembered all the tricks of the trade and still got her way. In Preston Sturges’s “The Lady Eve”, playing a cardsharp vamp who passes for an English lady, Barbara creates a deliciously cunning character. Her victim is a gullible herpetologist named Hopsy Pike (Henry Fonda), who gasps: “You’re certainly a funny girl for anyone to meet who’s been up the Amazon for a year”. Barbara’s other great role around this period was the deadly, peroxided Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s chilling “ Double Indemnity”, in which she ensnares a weakling (Fred MacMurray) in a scheme to knock off her husband and collect the insurance. These roles, the light side and the dark of the American breed of desirable femme fatale, demonstrate what critic Richard Corliss said: “When she was good, she was very, very good.
Source:
Stanwyck starred in almost 100 films during her career and received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). In 1954 she appeared opposite Ronald Reagan in the western Cattle Queen of Montana. Perhaps her most famous role was in the 1941 film The Lady Eve, in which she starred with Henry Fonda.
Source:
Re-teaming with Double Indemnity costar Fred MacMurray, Stanwyck’s second film with Sirk casts her as Norma Miller Vale, a cosmopolitan career woman with a flourishing fashion business. When Norma runs into former flame Clifford Groves (MacMurray), a bored suburbanite who feels that his wife (Bennett) and family take him for granted, the two are tempted to rekindle their romance. Clifford’s son Vinnie eventually spots the two together and suspects adultery, engendering the domestic melodrama that drives this underrated Sirkian scrutiny of hypocritical American morality.
Source:
Smitten insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) plots the perfect murder with femme fatale client Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck): Stage her husband's "accidental" death to collect double indemnity on his life insurance, then abscond with the loot. Read More
Source:
Billy Wilder's 1944 Double Indemnity is the obvious Stanwyck film noir choice. But Martha launched Stanwyck on a postwar noir cycle that includes gems never on VHS. Shoddy DVDs are available, but here Martha is pristine. A deep adolescent secret enables the town's most powerful woman to dominate her weakling husband (Kirk Douglas in his screen debut).
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Indemnity