This is an extract from Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir.

Nineteen seventy-nine was an intense moment in my education. I was nineteen and a dogsbody in an insurance company. In October I committed a misdemeanour…

I had enrolled on a unit of the British Film Institute Certificate in Film Study and it meant I had to be in Parsons Green, southwest London at 6:30. This meant that I would need to leave Petersfield at 4:00 to catch the train to Waterloo. I thought it best to play the game. I asked if I could start early on Tuesdays and leave early to attend an evening class in Accounting. They overreacted. I was called in to speak to the head of department and he told me that, if I were successful in my exams, they would offer me the world: a better job, a promotion, more money, more luncheon vouchers. I was flattered. But I felt awful. I went about my duties with a growing urge to confess the real reason for my request. That afternoon I explained my true motive to Enid in Data Control. Touching her hair, she smiled to herself. Minutes later I was summoned into the General Manager's office and reprimanded for deceiving the company which had seen fit to employ me and, furthermore, should ANY instance of deception be traced back to me in future I would be OUT.

One film epitomized the thoughts and feelings I was having better than any other. I had seen Double Indemnity for the first time in May of that year on BBC2. My parents were out which meant that I would have to get myself up and see to my breakfast in the morning. To hell with that! Out went the light and on went the TV. As a 'review' I felt compelled to write at the time put it: Double Indemnity is a brutally powerful film that left me literally shattered and feeling quite sick inside. However purple, looking back, my sentiments seemed increasingly prescient. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) works for an insurance company and tries to crook the house. Awaiting the big payoff, he struggles. As he quietly goes about his duties, the net closes in. My own situation bore down on me as my colleagues' smirks abruptly turned to poker faces whenever I approached, barely able to hear my own footsteps.

Critically venerated and slavishly examined, Double Indemnity fulfills the classic's cardinal attribute; it is timeless. This year as it turns sixty, you know it will be as dark as it was when first trade-shown shortly before the Normandy landings in 1944. And as chipper as its director Billy Wilder appeared to be right up to his death at 95. Indeed, one of the most ironic aspects of this poignantly realistic film is its historical context. For all the dexterity of its innovative flashback structure, we don't actually know when it is taking place. The date of the dictaphone confession in which Walter tells of murdering his beautiful lover's husband for the insurance settlement places it in the summer of 1938: "around the end of May it was." But why no evidence of America's dire economic condition at that time? The clothes and the cars place it in the mid-40s, contemporaneous with its release. But why no mention of the war, then reaching its bloody climax? Never mind; this curious abstraction from history made it eminently available to an intelligent postwar child labouring under the burdens of cultural deprivation and a romantic imagination. Like all recollection, Walter's confession is selective, recalling the events and the dreadful mood that cloaked them.

For me, Double Indemnity crystallized both my own dread and the appeal of cinema itself. The film's sheer drive is both intellectually and emotionally affecting, a truly mobile marriage of head and heart. On the one hand, its style emerged from a stimulating amalgam of German Expressionist aesthetics, tough modernist writing, and straitened wartime economies, the brew culminating in an exotic potpourri of art and history. On the other, it had generous close-ups of Walter and his lover in sexy clinches, and in one scene Barbara Stanwyck wears a clingy white sweater. As theorist V.F. Perkins has written: "The movie's claim to significance lies in its embodiment of tensions, complexities and ambiguities." I still cannot explain quite why their final clinch in which Walter shoots the lovelorn Phyllis in the guts is both appalling and alluring in the same breath.

In December 1979 Double Indemnity played in a major Billy Wilder retrospective at the National Film Theatre. I scurried back to London on that darkening Saturday afternoon and braced myself. At the next available opportunity I was fired.

                                                                  © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004