D.O.A.

Rudolph Maté, USA 1950, 83 mins

Small town accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O' Brien) goes to San Francisco for a week on the town before he marries his fiancée Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton). One morning Frank wakes up feeling more than just hung over. This prompts him to go to see Dr MacDonald, who tells him the shocking news: Frank is suffering from radiation poisoning and has only a few days to live.

MacDonald makes arrangements to have Frank admitted to hospital, but Frank has other ideas. Rather than just lying down and waiting to die he's determined to spend his last few days tracking down his murderers, his desperate quest taking him further and further into a nightmarish demi monde of sleazy jazz clubs, psychopathic killers and criminal gangs.

A fast paced thriller with strong film noir overtones, D.O.A. is one of those films that shows just how indebted Hollywood was to European émigrés. Director Rudolph Maté had worked as cinematographer on Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932), and his film draws its initial inspiration from Robert Siodmak's German film Der Mann, Der Seinen Morder Sucht (1931).

Like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Double Indemnity (1944) D.O.A. starts with its protagonist dead or dying, relying upon piquing our curiosity sufficiently for us to want to know how the ending we already know came about. But, unlike Indemnity's Walter Neff or the male leads of Out of the Past (1947), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Killers (1946) and numerous other noirs, Frank Bigelow does not bring about his own downfall through his inability to resist a femme fatale and her schemes. Rather, he's just an everyman who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - like the lynch-mob victim in Fury (1936) he's simply the victim of a simple twist of fate. Shit happens and then you die. It's a frightening prospect and an apparently timeless one, as testified to by the subsequent D.O.A. remakes Color Me Dead (1969) and D.O.A. (1988).

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99