Film noir is at its most coldly analytical when examining murder as a financial transaction – the calculation that a human life is worth less than the inheritance it withholds, the insurance payout it blocks, or the partnership it refuses to dissolve. These films reveal how completely the language of commerce has colonized even the most intimate sphere of human action, until a spouse becomes an obstacle to be eliminated, a partner an impediment to be removed, and death just another business strategy. The horror of profit murder in noir is not the crime itself but its banality – the way it is planned in the same rational terms as any other investment.
The definitive profit murder film, in which an insurance salesman helps a housewife kill her husband to collect double indemnity on his accident policy, narrating his own downfall into a dictaphone. The film is structured as an actuarial table of human weakness, each element precisely calculated.
A drifter and a cafe owner’s wife murder her husband for the insurance and the freedom to run the cafe together, only for the machinery of guilt and desire to destroy what they gained. The film’s ironic ending – in which the law punishes the innocent act for the same crime – is noir’s purest moral statement.
A corrupt policeman called to investigate a prowler falls for the rich woman whose husband he then murders to collect her insurance money and marry her. Van Heflin’s methodical villainy is rendered with unusual psychological honesty about the economic calculation underlying his crime.
A playwright discovers her husband and his former girlfriend are plotting to kill her for her fortune, and turns her knowledge and considerable intelligence into a weapon of self-defense. Joan Crawford’s late-night terror sequences are among the most sustained suspense passages in 1950s noir.
A woman and her lover plan to murder her unstable husband at Niagara Falls and collect on his life insurance, but the plan achieves a perverse reversal. The film uses one of America’s most romantic landmarks as a backdrop for a murder plot of clinical coldness.
A woman who refuses to return accidental mob money kills both a blackmailer and then her own husband to preserve her windfall. Lizabeth Scott plays the most nakedly calculating of all noir’s femmes fatales – a woman whose motive is purely and simply money.
A man suspects his sister-in-law of poisoning his brother for his money and then turning her attention to the brother’s children. Joseph Cotten brings quiet authority to a film that explores the terrible difficulty of proving that a charming person is a murderer.
A woman witnesses a strangling from her apartment window and must convince police of what she saw while the killer works to have her dismissed as hysterical. Barbara Stanwyck conveys the terrifying isolation of a woman whose evidence is dismissed because the killer is more socially credible.
A beautiful woman’s pathological possessiveness of her novelist husband leads her to methodically eliminate everyone who claims a share of his attention. Unusually filmed in lush Technicolor, the film demonstrates that noir can operate in daylight and primary colors.
A bedridden, paranoid husband accuses his wife and doctor of plotting to kill him and mails a letter to the DA before dying. Loretta Young carries the film’s suspense on her increasingly frantic attempts to outrun the mail.