Reading Response One: Double Indemnity (3 to 33)

As I started reading Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, It quickly made sense how this story is attributed to being a work associated with film noir.  As the examples given on the hand-out of "Primary Characteristics and Conventions of Film Noir: Themes and Styles" state, mystery, moral corruption, paranoia, murderers, and insecurity quickly came to mind.  In only the first thirty-three pages of this story, I saw examples of each of these convictions being displayed.  Starting with the first kiss to a married woman, all the way to a "speedy loan" for the daughter of a soon to be murdered man.  A characteristic of the first section of the novel that I felt related to the following quote is..a twisted plotting of a plan to create a perfect murder.  The quote I picked was from page 24, in Double Indemnity, " If that seems funny to you, that I would kill a man just to pick up a stack of chips, it might not seem so funny if you were back of that wheel, instead of out front.  I had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to crook the wheel, that that stuff didn't seem real to me anymore."  For me this quote speaks of a non-shullant attitude to what happens in life.  Kind of like, live life as it comes.  For me, this character (Huff) is portraying himself as a expert in the field of corruption, who knows the ins and outs of how to get around from being caught.  This story was one big roller-coaster ride for me, with many climaxes.  A "desperate married woman,"  named Phylis is introduced in the novel, whose true intentions are nothing but inhumane.  She wants to collect on an insurance policy of her husbands', not caring about who she involves in her plot.  Hurting the feelings of her husbands' daugther Lola, at the thought of her father being murdered, is furthest from this woman's mind.  Even Mr. Huff, the insurance man, who becomes blinded by this woman's beauty finds himself mesmerized at helping her in her scheme to "get rid of her husband" in order to collect on his accidental death policy.  On page 26 in the novel of Double Indemnity it states the character of Mr. Huff states, "But what bothered me wasn't that.  It was the witness that Phylis brought out.  I thought she would have some friend of the family in to dinner.  She didn't.  She brought the stepdaughter in.  The more I looked at her, the less I liked it.  Having to sit with her there, knowing all the time what we were going to do to her father, was one of the things I hadn't bargained for."  For me this made me feel that Mr. Huff did have some compassion in him, probably more so than Phylis, but even this was not enough for him to say, let's just call the whole thing off!