D.O.A.

D.O.A. (1950)

Runtime: 83 minutes

Directed by: Rudolph Mate

Starring: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett

From: Cardinal Pictures

I got back to watching film noir, and I explain how I selected this one in my Letterboxd review below:

This is another movie that came up due to a messageboard conversation. Someone brought up a link to a page that mentioned 50 noir films (both famous and not so famous) that were on YouTube, where there are way more than 50 different genre movies to watch. I figured I should watch one of those, and I picked out one of the most famous noirs of them all, one that became popular not only due to its quality but also due to it being public domain and thus easy to track down.

The movie has an awesome concept and a great opening. Frank Bigelow enters a police station and announces that he's been murdered. From there until the final minute, it's a flashback to how an average accountant and notary from an average California town goes to San Francisco for a vacation, gets poisoned and there's no antidote and he'll drop dead sometime soon, he has to be on the run to try and find the person or persons responsible, and he ends up in Los Angeles.

Like I said this is a high quality movie where you get all the expected noir tropes, from the dark plot of someone trying to stop a nefarious plot involving a sale of iridium, to the hard-boiled dialogue, to there being some nasty bad guys (especially the typical “big bad henchman”, this time played by Neville Brand) to how morbid it is that the protagonist has to do all this while in the last days of his life.

The movie does have some goofiness, especially early on when several times you see Bigelow (played nicely by Edmond O'Brien) sees an attractive woman and his arousal level is made clear via a loud slide whistle; it just sticks out as cartoony in an otherwise serious picture. Despite all that, this is a classic noir for good reason. The cast performs admirably, there are some extraordinary scenes, the love story isn't a detriment, and the ending is quite memorable. I am glad I finally saw this, and I imagine in the future I'll watch the Dennis Quaid remake from the late 80's.