Fred MacMurray ("Neff") and Barbara Stanwyck ("Mrs Dietrichson") in Billy Wilder's 1944 movie
I saw it again the other night on TCM with genial host Robert Osborne in impeccably tailored suit. The dialogue as snappy as ever: Edward G. Robinson as Keyes — Fred MacMurray's senior colleague, friend, and ultimately nemesis — rides the younger man, and Neff replies: "I love you, too."
When Neff comes knocking on Mrs Dietrichson's door, hoping to sell her husband on an insurance policy, Nettie the housemaid is about to throw him out when Stanwyck clad only in a towel makes her first appearance. Neff: "I'd hate to think of your denting a fender if you're not fully covered." While she excuses herself to become more fully covered, Nettie shows him to the living room. "They keep the liquor locked up," she says. "That's all right. I always carry y own keys," Neff says.
I know that you can find the dialogue on line, but I'd rather trust my memory for the rapid-fire patter between these two in their first go at it. I especially like the succession of "suppose" sentences:
She: There's a speed limit in this state. 45 mph.
He: How fast was I going officer?
She: Ninety.
He: Suppose you get off your motorcycle and giver me a ticket.
She: Suppose I let you off with just a warning this time.
He: Suppose it doesn't take.
She: Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles.
He: Suppose I pit my head on youtr shoulder and cry.
She: Suppose you put your head on my husband's shoulder.
He: That tears it.
Brilliant, and notice that Stanwyck, the deadlier of the two, is cast in the authority position: handing out tickets, rapping knuckles.
To orchestrate the scenes where Neff becomes infatuated with Mrs Dietrichson's daughter Lola (just as Stanwyck herself gets involved with Lola's erstwhile goyfriend Nino Zachetti: ah, blessed chiasmus), Wilder opts for Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Yes, I know I typed the wrong letter there but I think I shall leave it stand.
For the climactic scene between Neff and Mrs. D, the song wafting into an open window is "Tangerine," that great ode to a fickle and vain fashionista. She: "We're both rotten."
He: "Only you're a little more rotten."
Now Neff decides he no longer likes "Tangerine." He closes the window and she shoots him.
She: "I never loved you, Walter. I'm rotten to the heart."
(The heart of the noir heroine in one superbly delivered line.)
He: "Sorry, baby. I'm not buying."
She: "I'm not asking you to buy. Just hold me close."
He: "Goodbye, Baby."
He shoots her.
When Keyes returns to the office, in time to hear enough of the confession Neff is dictating into the recorder, he tells Neff "you're all washed up." You couldn't figure this one out, Neff tells Keyes, glorying in this small victory in the face of disaster, because it was "too close — right across the desk from you." "Closer than that, Walter."
And when Neff collapses in his hapless attempt to reach the elevator and escape, Keyes calmly phones the police.
"I love you, too," Neff says. The movie's final words.
— DL