Big Trouble

A most sweetly demented salute to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Cassavetes concluded his directorial career with the wacky surprises in a chaotically inventive black neurotic humour. A far cry from his vérité style work, it’s a glossy spoof thriller in which an insurance salesman, desperate for finance to send his triplets to Yale, gets caught up in a conspiracy plot after agreeing to forge a double indemnity policy with a tycoon’s sultry wife. Sounds familiar? Wait for the second-third which turns the original Raymond Chandler hard-boiled detective story upside down into a farce. For a life of sophistication, a serving of screwball comedy makes the rightful wind-up.