In a June 5 piece for The Guardian, Film London Chief Executive Adrian Wootton discusses Raymond Chandler’s purported cameo appearance in Double Indemnity, which Chandler co-adapted with director Billy Wilder from James M. Cain’s novel:
“… More than 60 years after its release, a French cinema historian and two US crime-writers almost simultaneously happened on the same bizarre discovery – that Raymond Chandler, uncredited and previously unnoticed, has a tiny cameo in Double Indemnity. On 14 January, the American mystery writer Mark Coggins, tipped off by another writer, John Billheimer, posted the news on his website, Riordan’s desk, while the French journalist Olivier Eyquem, wrote about on his blog on March 30.”
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Does the guy sitting on the bench – sixteen minutes into the film – actually look like Raymond Chandler? Well, sort of – based on the Chandler photos I’ve found online. (According to Wootton’s article, there is no television or film footage featuring Chandler, except for a snippet from a home movie.)
The strange thing about this discovery – fifty years after Chandler’s death – is that no one associated with the film has ever remarked that the author of The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye did a cameo in Billy Wilder’s noir classic, which remains one of the best-known films of the 1940s.
True, Wilder and Chandler reportedly locked horns during the making of Double Indemnity, but there was no reason for the director’s silence decades after Chandler’s death. (Wilder died in 2002).
Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and/or the technical personnel associated with the film could easily come forth with the story years – if not decades – ago. This “conspiracy of silence” doesn’t make much sense.
Could it just be an extra made up to look like Chandler? And that that was in fact Wilder’s intention?
Marsha Hunt on Valentino actor Anthony Dexter
In his blog, author Allan Ellenberger speaks with Marsha Hunt about Anthony Dexter, who played Rudolph Valentino in the 1951 biopic Valentino, and with whom Hunt costarred in a stage production of The King and I.
Here’s one quote:
“One of the first things that struck me about Tony Dexter was – and I don’t mean that it was obtrusive – but he didn’t have an ego. And I was amazed during rehearsals, this Anthony Dexter, who had played Valentino; larger than life, you know, macho man dramatic hero of all womanhood, didn’t seem to have an ego.”
Valentino lawsuit
Alice Terry, Valentino’s costar in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (above) and The Conquering Power, sued Columbia Pictures for $750,000 on the grounds that the studio’s Valentino showed a character representing her (played by Eleanor Parker as a sort of Alice Terry-Mae Murray combo) having an affair with Valentino both before and after her marriage to Rex Ingram, the director of the two Valentino-Terry efforts and with whom Terry remained married until his death in 1950. She won a six-figure out-of-court settlement.
Following Valentino, Anthony Dexter – who bore an uncanny resemblance to the silent film idol – made a few B films in the 1950s (The Brigand, Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl, Five Maidens from Outer Space), but was unable to sustain his film career. He died in 2001 at the age of 88.