This is to me one of the most endlessly rewatchable of classic films. It is the definitive film noir, that brand of dark story nicknamed by French critics. Here we have all the elements of the noir style : the alluring fame fatale (Barbara Stanwyck in her greatest role, bad to the bone), the suave anti-hero who gets caught in a web of deceit, desire and murder (Fred MacMurray playing against type which he would do again later for Wilder in The Apartment (1960)) and the clinical investigator, here not a detective but an insurance boss (Edward G. Robinson, masterful as ever). Billy Wilder had directed a very good film before this in Five Graves To Cairo (1943) but he really arrived here with his trademark wisecracking dialogue. The sequence where Walter Neff (MacMurray) meets Phyliss Dietrichson for the first time is a masterpiece of double entendre and suppressed desire. Stanwyck is much sexier fully clothed than many female stars in modern films and of course MacMurray is doomed.
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