D.O.A.
Directed by Rudolph Maté
1950/USA
Written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Green
Cardinal Pictures
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime Instant Video
[box] Dr. MacDonald: Of course, I’ll have to notify the police. This is a case for Homicide.
Frank Bigelow: Homicide?
Dr. MacDonald: I don’t think you fully understand, Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.[/box]
If they could only have left the girlfriend out of this movie …
The story takes place in flashback as accountant Frank Bigelow tells the police about his last three days. He runs a business in Banning and decides to take week-long vacation in San Francisco without office manager and girlfriend Paula. She personifies the needy, suffocating woman, calling him constantly and asking over and over for reassurance. But Frank forges on. The first night there he hits a jazz club and has a few drinks. The next morning he wakes up feeling rotten.
He visits a doctor who tells him he has been fatally poisoned with a “luminous toxin” and has at most a week or two to live. Frank goes on a mission to find out who murdered him. His first lead is a man from Los Angeles named Phillips who was trying to reach him. He discovers that he notarized a bill of sale for Phillips several months previously. From here, Frank gets entangled with an iridium smuggling operation and thence with some very nasty thugs. With Neville Brand as a psycho.
If I had been Frank and been saddled with Paula, poisoning may have seemed like a relief! But, 1950’s style, Frank’s ordeal only makes him appreciate the domesticity Paula offers. I can’t help it, she wrecks every scene she is in for me. All the parts with Frank running around solving the mystery are very suspenseful. I like Edmund O’Brien as an ordinary guy whose immanent demise has made extraordinarily fearless.
Clip – inside the jive bar – cinematography by Ernest Lazlo
