When I was growing up in the 1960s, I thought of Fred MacMurray as the amiable patriarch of My Three Sons, and thought of Barbra Stanwyck as the tough matriarch of The Big Valley. It was a few more years before I’d delve into the earlier parts of their careers – such as this 1944 film noir classic, in which MacMurray plays an insurance salesman seduced into evil acts, including murder, by Stanwyck’s femme fatale.