Double Indemnity Baby Food

The other day I saw a great post over on Gems about retail shopping (one of the things she does amazingly well on that site are these great round-ups of images--both new and vintage--centered around a theme such as this). The retro images in the post, in particular, reminded me of a scene in the movie Double Indemnity that has always struck my fancy. In it, the two main characters are having a clandestine meeting about their secret nefarious plans in a supermarket. Behind their heads through much of the sequence is sign indicating that they are in the Baby Food aisle, and a big display of boxes with creepy baby faces on them. I'm not a huge film noir fan myself, but this genius stroke of set decoration has always seemed to me to get right at the heart of what I understand to be one of the genre's underpinnings: a sort of repressed paranoia and deep unease hiding in the center of seemingly happy simple mid-century life. That, and it's also somehow quite hilariously funny, though whether intentionally or unintentionally I don't know.