About D.O.A. (1950)
The story behind the film
D.O.A. has one of the greatest opening hooks in movie history. A man walks through the long corridors of a police headquarters, steps into the homicide division and announces that he wants to report a murder. Whose? "Mine." The rest of the film is told in flashback.
Frank Bigelow, an accountant and notary public from the small town of Banning, California, takes a break from his work — and from his secretary and girlfriend Paula — for a few wild days in San Francisco. After a night of jazz clubs with a group of conventioneers, he wakes up feeling ill and learns from doctors that he has been given a "luminous" poison for which there is no cure. He has only days, perhaps hours, to live, and he spends them racing between San Francisco and Los Angeles to find out who killed him, and why.
The film was directed by Rudolph Maté, previously a celebrated cinematographer (he shot The Passion of Joan of Arc, also on Starlite TV), and produced by Leo C. Popkin's Cardinal Pictures.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Rudolph Maté; written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene
- Edmond O'Brien as Frank Bigelow
- Pamela Britton as Paula Gibson
- Luther Adler as Majak
- Neville Brand as Chester, Majak's psychotic henchman
- Beverly Garland (credited as Beverly Campbell), in her film debut
- Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo; music by Dimitri Tiomkin
Why it's worth watching
D.O.A. is film noir at its most fatalistic and most propulsive. The premise means the film never sags: every scene is a ticking clock. O'Brien's increasingly desperate, sweating performance sells it completely, and the location photography of postwar San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles — including the Bradbury Building — gives it a vivid sense of place. Neville Brand's giggling heavy is genuinely unnerving.
It's also a classic puzzle mystery, with a tangled trail of stolen iridium, forged signatures and double-crosses for viewers to follow along with Bigelow.
Fun facts
- The Library of Congress added D.O.A. to the National Film Registry in 2004.
- Because the film fell into the public domain, it has been remade several times, including Color Me Dead (1969) and D.O.A. (1988) with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.
- A comic running joke in the San Francisco hotel has a "wolf whistle" sound effect play whenever Bigelow notices an attractive woman.
Public-domain status
D.O.A.'s copyright was not renewed on time — Wikipedia attributes it to a filing error — so the film is in the US public domain. See "Rights & source" below.