Big Trouble

Echoing the story line of their earlier collaboration, Falk plays the incorrigible conman, a comic to straight man Arkin's hapless, un willing accomplice. Pic also borrows from the classic Double Indemnity, with Arkin as the insurance salesman gone bad and Beverly d'Angelo as the wife who conspires to murder her husband (Falk). Unlike Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, however, it's not love that motivates them to swindle the insurance company but a 5,-000,000 insurance policy. D'Angelo can collect if Falk dies in a fall off a train (sound familiar?). Arkin, under pressure from wife Valerie Curtin to send his three sons to Yale, would also reap the ill-gotten gain. In the intermittently amusing variation on the Double Indemnity theme, it turns out Falk and D'Angelo faked the husband's murder. Arkin finds out he was duped when Falk comes to a meeting with Arkin's superiors (Charles Durning and Robert Stack) «disguised » as the widow's
attorney. (Variety, 4.6.1986)