Double Indemnity and A Quest for Conscience

This afternoon marked the second screening in the ongoing series of films shown under the Wagging Finger of Shame banner. We ultimately settled on Double Indemnity after deciding between that and Sleeper. Unfortunately, our association with the Library @ Esplanade screening room seems to be cursed. At least on this occasion, the booking was made (I had done so in person to minimize the possibility of a screw up) but when we went into the screening room it was to find that the television and later the sound wasn't functioning. It took almost 20 minutes for them to sort out the problem before we could start showing the film.

Double Indemnity is one of the classic noir films, considered to be representative of the genre and rightfully so. It was directed by cinema stalwart Billy Wilder and contains a cracking script co-written by crime noir novelist Raymond Chandler from the book by James M Cain. Suffice to say they just don't write movie scripts like that in hollywood anymore. The movie also contains probably one of the best film noir seductresses in the genre and of course a wonderful plot about the near perfect crime.

Afterwards it was off to the Substation to watch an ACSian theatre production called The Quest of Conscience. The play basically takes the form of an interview between a journalist and the commander of a Nazi concentration camp as she (and presumably the audience) struggles to understand how a man can be in charge of the killing of more than one million individuals and whether he accepts his cupability/guilt for the massacres that happened.

It was an interesting production, with a large supporting cast ensconed within metal frames (a physical manifestation of the entrapment suffered by the Jews). The supporting cast acting out the dialogue of the Commandant's wife and the Jewish prisoners as seen from extracts from interviews the journalist had done earlier. I especially liked the interweaving of Jewish/German songs and I thought the final scene with the blowing out of a single candle very artistic (if not completely original).

The key to the play was the performance of the two leads. I thought that the Commandant, while he tried hard enough, just didn't have the range and nuance of expression to fully carry the role. The hint of an accent and the occasionally unclear expression did not aid matters. Ultimately what didn't come through enough was the sense of fatalism inherent in the belief that one cannot be held responsible for doing one's job well, if forced to do so under duress and if one believed that even the gesture of sacrificing yourself for ideals would be merely token and ultimately ineffectual. In the end, did he accept that he was guilty insofar as so many of the Jews died while he was alive due to his own cowardice and determination to do what was necessary for his own survival and that of his family? Can one fault a man like him for deciding on survival, no matter how heinous the cost of that survival, given that the killings would have continued, with or without him? These nuances didn't come through.

The girl acting as the journalist was stronger in her role, and it helped that she very much looked the part. She was effective in adopting the persona of the hard hitting journalist demanding answers, demanding the truth. A criticism though was that she was too one-dimensional in her portrayal. In a sense what was a powerful aspect of the role of the journalist was that she genuinely could not comprehend how a man like the Commandant could live with himself after the acts (of omission if not commission itself) that he had committed. She isn't demanding an admittence of guilt so much as struggling herself to understand him as a fellow human being (as opposed to a heartless killer) who is somehow able to still reconcile what he did at least until the end. That is the quest for conscience that the audiences is brought along to see.