MikePadgett.com

• Director: Billy Wilder
• United States, 1944
• 

In some life insurance policies, where the policyholder dies in untypical circumstances, the policy pays out double. It’s called double indemnity, and when old Mr Dietrichson gets bumped off in revenge for the heinous crimes of being cranky and middle-aged, it’s made to look like he fell off a moving train.

It follows that the real protagonist in this movie is implausibility. That a housewife with a bad wig could persuade a worldly insurance salesman into helping her to off her husband. That our friendly local salesman would have no qualms about strangling a man with whom he has no beef. That the filmmakers thought a 23-year old actress would pass for the innocent teenage daughter.

Double Indemnity is creatively shot, and as we can expect from Wilder, the script is witty and sharp - indeed, Edward G Robinson positively thrives in his role as the shrewd invesigator Keyes. However, and perhaps this complaint is all too modern, the plot lacks purpose and the characters lack motivation, so the movie is robbed of any real tension.

First, there was panic over students using the World Wide Web to cheat on their essays.

Then it was revealed that CIA employees had been doctoring Wikipedia articles on the subject of such public menaces as President Ahmadinejad and Oprah Winfrey.

The Internet and Hard Fact have always enjoyed a difficult relationship. Sometimes the truths were held to be self-evident to all but the most gullible users (remember the Nigerian 419 Scam?); others were open to interpretation (cf. the Taser incidents at the Universities of Florida and Los Angeles respectively).

For millions around the world, Wikipedia is the cutting edge of information delivery. At the time of writing, the website claims to deliver in the region of 8.2 million articles in 253 languages [source] - it’s a veritable fountain of knowledge, much to the bitter chagrin of commercial encyclopaedia publishers.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia and access to content is free. Whereas access to the 120,000+ online articles provided by a leading commercial encyclopaedia is normally about £5.00 per month. Put it that way and a couple of key points emerge:

• You’re more likely to expect (and forgive) if a bit of inaccuracy creeps into 8.2 million freely available articles in 253 languages
• A commercial encyclopaedia couldn’t compete, even with “a staff of 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors” [Encyclopaedia Britannica, source]. more likely to be biased

We don’t really have any numbers on Wikipedia vandalism. One or two concerned parties have taken to documenting outrages, often with the righteous indignation of a juror.

Meantime, those of us on the fringe of the debate might be inclined to see the funny side. Am I the only puerile fool barely able to stifle a giggle at Bill Gates’ portrait defaced with a silly moustache? Or the assertion that George Washington “had a shit on a stick and then told people that it was OK to have unprotected sex …”? Or this non-sequitor I found this evening?

• Director: Robert Siodmak
• United States, 1946
• 

Insurance investigator Jim Reardon uncovers dark dealings when assigned to the death of Ole ‘Swede’ Andersen. Told in flashback - with more than a pinch of nihilism - from interviews with associates, acquaintances and the police, The Killers is a murky but tense affair, based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Locked within the confines of those flashbacks, nobody’s innocent. Rather, in true noir fashion, most of the key characters are painted in shades of grey rather than black or white.

Rising stars Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster both impress here, managing to pulp the cardboard psychology of studio cinema. Lancaster does a middleweight portrayal of a boxer-turned-hood, though his Swede is by no means in the same ring as Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. Gardner meanwhile grabs her audience by keeping her motivation a mystery, leaving viewers guessing about her innocence right to the end.

• Director: Charles Vidor
• United States, 1946
• 

Despite being one of noir’s unlikelier icons, Rita Hayworth seems to have cornered the market in breezy gals with something to hide and in Gilda she does a roaring trade.

For this is indeed a movie of contrasts: it’s a dark, claustrophobic tale played out in a lavish Buenos Aires gambling joint; it’s about the intrigue of secretive Europeans and postwar paranoia in a wide open region that never saw battle. And into this twitchy scene - in which the gamblers watch the joint, the joint watches the monopoly cranks and the police watch everyone - steps all-American Hayworth who, whilst hiding a troubled past, sparkles like a firework that sets the whole thing alight.

If there’s one anomaly, it’s the anti-noir happy ending, in which Glenn Ford’s downbeat Johnny Farrell skips off into the sunset with a suddenly unfettered Gilda. Yet it is just about forgivable, since without their mutual past and their mutual desire, the central tension of the plot - built as it is around these two contrasting characters - could never be so convincing.

• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• United States, 2007
• 

From far away you can hear the overhead lines crackling across the desert as they stretch through the arid expanses of Nevada toward the mirage glow of Las Vegas. That crackling, it’s the sound of Messrs Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al phoning their lines in.

If you put a scene’s worth of frames from Soderbergh’s movies on the wall, they’ll look lurid like a Warhol screenprint, so it’s no surprise that the neons of Vegas make Ocean’s Thirteen an orgy of colour and the barely trying cast is obviously as dazzled by the bright artificial as Raoul Duke.

This is a poseur movie for boys and girls who like to watch the boys and girls go by: since while Sinatra, Martino and the junior Davis brylcreemed their way through five casinos royale, these 21st century cruisers of the modern middle age are just too slick to make it stick.