Fred MacMurray

Fred MacMurray was an American actor best known for playing Walter Neff, the insurance investigator who engineers a murder for a femme fatale, in Billy Wilder's 'Double Indemnity' (1944).

MacMurray's performance as Neff — an ordinary, competent man destroyed by a woman's manipulation and his own greed — established the everyman-as-rogue template that Nolan's Leonard Shelby inverts (Leonard is manipulated but cannot remember being so).