Richard Schickel

“And so she signed on, not knowing, surely, what is now quite clear to us: that she was about to create one of the enduring archetypes of the American screen, the noir female. Certainly this creature had her antecedents in the vamps of the silent screen. But they tended to be European in origin, and to hide their schemings under a highly romantic manner. It might also be argued that there were hints of what was to come in figures like Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (though she, of course, affected a genteel disguise for her true motives). But really the bluntness and hardness of Stanwyck's work was something essentially new, and the alacrity with which it was imitated in film after film of the 40s is one of the interesting, largely unexplored questions of our movie and social history. It surely had something to do with the freedom American women claimed for themselves during the war years, and the nervousness that stirred among males - especially males who were absent at the front and concerned about the fidelity of the girls they left behind. Hard to keep them down on the farm (or behind a suburban picket fence) after they had found work in the rough atmosphere of factories, known the joys of living alone and, for that matter, going to bars alone. Phyllis Dietrichson did none of those things, but she had been a working woman and she was clearly capable of - putting it mildly - a high degree of self-sufficiency.”
― Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity