D.O.A was the first film noir I ever saw. I couldn’t have been
more than thirteen years old when I stumbled across it in a videocassette
bargain bin at Wal-Mart. I’m not sure why I bought it. I had no idea what “film
noir” was, had never heard of Edmond O’Brien, and had not yet developed an
affection for any movie that predated Star Wars. But the plot
sounded interesting: an ordinary guy on vacation in San Francisco discovers
he’s been incurably poisoned and has less than two days to track down his own
killer.
Since D.O.A is the
film that began my love affair with noir, I have to admit I’m pretty biased in
its favor. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is an exceptionally entertaining
piece of work. It stars Edmond O’Brien in his most famous role as Frank
Bigelow, a small town accountant who’s starting to feel boxed in by his
girlfriend Paula (Pamela Britton). Paula wants Frank to marry her; instead,
Frank buys Paula a beer and tells her he’s going to San Francisco to do some
sinning before he settles down with her. When he checks into his hotel in the
big city, he finds plenty of opportunity for sin. His neighbors are a rowdy
bunch of salesman who throw liquor (and their wives) at Bigelow and take him
along to a jazz club called The Fisherman. After a blistering jazz number,
Bigelow tries to pick up a sexy girl at the bar while an unknown man with a
flipped up collar and turned-down hat sneaks him a drink spiked with poison.
When Bigelow wakes up with a stomachache, he heads to the doctor. The
prognosis: “You’ve been murdered.” With time running out, Bigelow darts around
San Francisco and then down to LA in search of his killer.
The exact who and why of
the murder aren’t really the point of a movie like this, and to be honest I’m
rarely interested in the exact who and why of
murder plots, anyway. As Raymond Chandler once noted, a good mystery is one
where you don’t have to read the last page to be satisfied. A murder plot is
just a puzzle, and D.O.A isn’t really a puzzle. As directed by
former cinematographer Rudolph Mate` and written by the longtime screenwriting
duo of Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, D.O.A is more like a
sprint through the dark environs of film noir.
It is a movie of surfaces, and it
belongs to a genre of surfaces. Great noirs dig deep, of course, but the
cosmetic elements are what we love about these movies. It was the elements
of D.O.A that I fell in love with the first time I saw it: the
ties and coats, the casual location shots of San Francisco, the constant
pouring of alcohol and lighting of cigarettes, the intensity of the jazz scene
and the way the music from that scene echoes into the next. The very
artificiality of the thing—the beautiful harshness of the black and white
cinematography, the hardboiled poetry of the language, O’Brien’s frenzy—all of
it was like a smack needle for me. Once you become a noir junkie, only another
dose will do.
Now as I said before, D.O.A has
its flaws. Dmitri Tiomkin was a great composer, but the scenes of Bigelow
ogling girls at the hotel are scored like a Pepe le Pew cartoon. These scenes
are silly, but a bigger problem for the film is the awful performance of Pamela
Britton as Paula. Britton’s specialty was light comedy, and she had a
successful career on television in the early fifties. Here, though, she’s weepy
and annoying. You can't fault Bigelow for wanting to get away from Paula. She’s
a cipher, a soppy, clingy mess. When Bigelow declares his love for her at the
end, we just have to figure it’s the poison talking.
Luckily, the rest of the cast is
superb. Luther Adler is silk-smooth as Majak, the gangster at the center of the
mystery. And as Majak’s psycho henchman, Chester, the great Neville Brand is
simply my all-time favorite noir nutjob. Brand only has a few scenes, but his
orgasmic you-don’t-like-it-in-the-belly-do-you-Bigelow sniveling
just about steals the whole damn show. I say just about because
at the end of the day the film still belongs to Edmond O’Brien. This guy was
the King of the
Downward Spiral (see his other great crack-up performance
in Shield for Murder), and here he’s all sweaty urgency in the face
of certain death.
It was that certainty which drew me
to this movie in the first place and which continues to pull me deeper into the
noir universe. Frank Bigelow dies at the end of D.O.A. By saying
this, I’m not giving anything away; it’s the title of the movie. There’s never
any doubt that he’s going to die, just like there’s no doubt that I’m going to
die, yet D.O.A is about as fun as a movie has any right to be.
And that’s the big trick of film noir, the magic. How can a movie—how can an
entire genre—be predicated on making fatalism as fun as a night at a casino?
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