D.O.A. (1949) - Video On Demand

D.O.A. - Movie Review

An accountant on vacation in San Francisco gets a dose of lethal, slow-acting poison. He then begins a desperate search for the individual responsible for his impending demise. D.O.A. is considered a classic of the film noir genre and in 2004 The Library of Congress added the film to its National Film Registry.

The first scene of the film is a long, behind-the-back tracking sequence featuring Frank Bigelow (O'Brien) stumbling through a hallway into a police station to report a murder: his own. Disconcertingly, the police almost seem to have been expecting him and already know who he is.

The flashback that follows shows the fallout of Bigelow's decision to take off from his small California hometown where he is an accountant and notary public for a weekend of partying in San Francisco before returning to his life with Paula (Britton), his "confidential secretary" and love interest.

After crossing paths at his hotel with a group from a sales convention, Bigelow accompanies them on a night on the town. He ends up at a jazz club, where unknown to him (but not the audience) a man wearing an overcoat, hat, and a distinctive scarf swaps his drink for another. By the next morning, he not only has a hangover – upon visiting two separate medical facilities, he finds that he has swallowed a "luminous toxin" for which there is no antidote (a form of radiation poisoning).

With only a short time to live, Bigelow sets out to try to untangle the events behind his imminent demise, interrupted occasionally by phone calls from Paula. The complex trail of clues and red herrings rapidly multiply in the City of Angels. The murder involves gangsters and shady characters, but the key to the mystery is a bill of sale for stolen iridium, which Bigelow himself had unwittingly notarized.

D.O.A. reflects the photographic roots of director Rudolph Mate. He compiled an impressive resume as a cinematographer in Hollywood from 1935 (Dantes Inferno, Stella Dallas, The Adventures of Marco Polo, Foreign Correspondent, Pride of the Yankees, Gilda among others) until turning to directing in 1947. The lighting, locations, and atmosphere of brooding darkness were captured expertly by Mate and director of photography Ernest Lazlo.

In 1975 a review by Wallace Markfield in the New York Times characterised it as one of a number of the "very best of the B's ... made on workhouse budgets under coolie conditions" with a power "derived from the central image of one chunky, sweating, absolutely desolated human and from the way it puts the spectator inside that human's skin and nerves"

D.O.A. - Cast & Crew

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