It’s straight down the line for both of us, remember?
Femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, Double Indemnity
Anyone who has ever worked overnight or early weekend morning shifts knows the sometimes eerie, sometimes peaceful solitude of inhabiting a world asleep.
Cincinnati appeared more eerie than serene as I headed to the station one early Saturday morning in March 2014.
Heavy fog rose off of the Ohio River, swallowing the John A. Roebling bridge and low lying downtown streets.
I remember thinking of a scene from “Double Indemnity,” one of my favorite black-and-white films of the 1940’s, as I rolled up to the bridge.
The classic film noir features square-jawed actor, Fred MacMurray as life insurance agent Waltner Neff and silver screen sex symbol Barbara Stanwyck as the sultry Phyllis Dietrichson.
In the movie, Dietrichson uses her womanly wiles to convince Neff to off her husband and cash in on the life insurance policy Neff sold the poor sap in the first place.
Film noir being film noir, Neff and Dietrichson’s plot doesn’t go off quite as planned. There’s a double cross and a dogged insurance fraud investigator that leads to this final scene . . .
Lucky for me, I neither met a dangerous woman nor got hit by oncoming traffic when I stopped on the bridge to take the picture inspired by Double Indemnity.
(I did go on a few bad dates in 2014 through about mid-2017.)