"Mortally wounded, insurance-salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stumbles into his office in the dead of night. He grabs the Dictaphone on the desk of his boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) and begins dictating his confession -- which segues into a film-length flashback. While making a standard policy-renewal call, Walter meets the seductive Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), who, we learn in short order, is unhappily married. Phyllis coerces Walter into writing a double-indemnity policy -- which will pay off handsomely in case of accidental death -- on her husband (Tom Powers). Though Walter suspects from the start that Phyllis has murder in mind, he allows himself to be sucked into her scheme. Walter and Phyllis concoct a meticulous plan whereby Mr. Dietrichson will be murdered, with all the evidence pointing to an accidental fall off the observation platform of a moving train. The plan starts unraveling when insurance-agency boss Keyes, who loves Neff like a son and is completely in the dark about Walter's complicity, has a ""stinking hunch"" that Mr. Dietrichson's accident was no accident. Keyes determines that Phyllis was the murderer, but he also miscalculates the identity of Phyllis' co-conspirator. Afraid that he'll be exposed, Walter makes plans to bump off Phyllis -- but as usual, she's a step or two ahead of him. James M. Cain based his novel Three of a Kind on the notorious Hall-Mills case of 1927. Director Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation of Three of a Kind (retitled Double Indemnity) with Charles M. Brackett, manages to relate the whole sordid story while still remaining within the censorship confines of 1944. One of Wilder's concessions to the Hays Office was the removal of a climactic 10-minute execution sequence, though stills of that scene exist and have been reproduced dozens of times in film-history books. Double Indemnity is a perfectly cast, perfectly directed gem, as watchable now as when it was first shown, and was improved not one bit when remade for television in 1973."