Word: macmurray
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Double Indemnity (Paramount) is the season's nattiest, nastiest, most satisfying melodrama. James M. Cain's novelette was carnal and criminal well beyond screen convention. Director Billy Wilder's casting is just as unconventional. Naturals for their parts are Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman capable of murder; Barbara Stanwyck as the unprintable blonde (for the occasion) who exploits his capabilities; Edward G. Robinson as the insurance-claims sleuth who sniffs out the flaws in their all-but-perfect crime...
...artist, Bobby (Betty Hutton) an ace reporter, Patti (Mimi Chandler) a Shakespearean actress, Josie (Diana Lynn) a composer. Between daydreams and quarrels they pick up spare cash by staging musical acts at a local roadhouse. There they run afoul of a transient bandleader, Happy Marshall (Fred MacMurray), who promptly advises Cinemactress Lamour: "Let's not fight this thing, it's bigger than both of us." She is not impressed, but innocent Cinemactress Hutton...
Featuring the comedy team of Paulette Goddard and Fred MacMurray, the picture runs through a plentiful series of comic farce scenes without a hitch. They are aided by Roland Young, in the part of a henpecked husband who "wants to be bad," but doesn't know how to go about...
...original angle in the Washington turmoil and chaos theme, the servant situation, and an old one, the rooming situation, with the red tape of bureaucracy is thrown in for good measure. Pretty Paulette Goddard, as a neophyte secretary who prefers memorization to shorthand, cancels her boss's (Fred MacMurray) reservations in a crowded Washington hotel because she doesn't like the rooms and then the fun starts...
Thrown upon the streets of Washington, they search desperately for a base of operations from which MacMurray can sally forth to negotiate for an important government priority. The only way they can get lodgings is by masquerading as a butler and cook. They settle in the house of Roland Young and his WAC-officer wife and proceed to turn it into a veritable castle of bedlam. The subsequent scenes are exceedingly funny and, combined with a fast start, label this as a picture to be seen if possible...