The sultry, smokey thrillers of the Film Noir have the uncanny ability to provoke a feeling of wistful nostalgia, even in those who weren’t alive to experience this bygone era first hand. This is undoubtedly because the soft focused, fast-talking archetype, where alcoholism, misogyny and homicide are all par for the course, is so pointedly outside of reality. Even in the 1940s, the Noir universe, filled with its razor sharp one-liners, femme fatales and deadly eroticism, was an out and out fantasy, so it’s easy to understand how something so explicitly escapist can still hold a contemporary fascination.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s latest production, Double Indemnity, banks on this cinematic genre’s enduring allure, which makes its almost total failure to tap into the grippingly nail biting, sexually volatile soul of the Noir movement all the more frustrating. While not strictly speaking a stage adaptation of a film (unlike previous successes for MTC in this area with productions of Hitchcock classics), Tom Holloway’s play based on James M Cain’s novella makes no bones about its cinematic parallels. The story is quintessential:  Insurance salesman Walter Huff (Leon Ford) knows the system, and what’s more, he knows how to beat...