Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity

Philip Mar­lowe’s cre­ator Ray­mond Chan­dler did not, to put it mild­ly, seek out the lime­light. Any biog­ra­phy of that most assid­u­ous­ly stud­ied noir nov­el­ist can tell you so, but none can tell you that, albeit for less than a minute, Chan­dler appeared in a clas­sic of the sil­ver screen. The books have a good excuse for leav­ing out that strik­ing­ly unchar­ac­ter­is­tic detail: it took cinephiles decades to notices the cameo. “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,” writes the Guardian’s Adri­an Woot­ton. “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.”

While I per­son­al­ly rec­om­mend using this rev­e­la­tion as an excuse to watch Bil­ly Wilder’s immor­tal James M. Cain adap­ta­tion again in its entire­ty, you can view a clip of Chan­dler’s brief appear­ance in it above, which includes a slow-motion instant replay. “We will prob­a­bly nev­er know whose idea it was it to put Chan­dler in front of the cam­era, or if it took a few drinks to get him in the mood,” writes the Los Ange­les Times’ Car­olyn Kel­logg about this rare cin­e­mat­ic glimpse of the writer who did so much to earn Los Ange­les its place on the pulp-lit map. “And no one has suc­cess­ful­ly deci­phered the cov­er of what he’s read­ing, which would be nice to know too.” Alas, from this footage of lit­tle more than a seat­ed Chan­dler look­ing up from a book, we can expect to derive no seri­ous insights into his life or work; for those, we’ll need to go right back to the biogra­phies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray­mond Chan­dler & Ian Flem­ing in Con­ver­sa­tion (1958)

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

The Adven­tures of Philip Mar­lowe: The Radio Episodes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.