Archival Print! Wilder is prone to tales told by dead men; Fred MacMurray is prone, too, as he tells this one, a widening blood stain on his clothing gradually edging out suspense and leaving us with just the facts. Double Indemnity is spiced with twists of perverse humor-subtle psychological motivations are out, cold greed is in. Its California ambiance "reverberates with the forlorn poetry of late sunny afternoons" (Higham and Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties). But the haunting presence of the G-man in the person of Edward G. Robinson, thwarter of greed and desire, and like fate, omniscient and inevitable, casts his Germanic shadow over this bleached noir.