Feb 281950
 
three reels

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is a rather bland businessman with commitment issues and a very clingy girlfriend, Paula (Pamela Britton)—really, really clingy. He heads to San Francisco for a sudden vacation. After a night of wild partying, he discovers he’s been poisoned by a “luminous” substance and has between a day and a week to live. His obsessive investigation into his own murder, carried out with a drastic deepening of his unpleasant personality, leads to double-cross upon double-cross, a weird array of characters, and schemes that don’t make much sense.

Film Noir has been crossed with many genres, but half Noir/half Loony Tunes is something new. This is a wacky movie played straight. No level of overacting is sufficient. Frank yells at doctors like it’s performance art and everyone is happy to join him in taking things too far. But why shouldn’t he yell when he’s an average accountant, who becomes a super-sleuth, beats up thugs, gets into gunfights, and runs around with a poison in him for days which takes out another character in minutes? A scene at a jazzy nightclub turns frenetic, and could have been slipped into Reefer Madness. And let’s not forget about Chester (Neville Brand), the way, way, way out there psycho killer who spends ten minutes drooling over how he’s going to kill Frank.

And then there is the soundtrack. Dimitri Tiomkin was never a subtle composer, but this overwrought symphony edges into comedy, although that’s more to do with how it is used. Every over-the-top moment is pushed further with a blast of horns. But perhaps the strangest addition is the wolf-whistles. In the first act, whenever Frank stares at a girl (and he does often, with elaborate neck snapping), it is accompanied by a wolf-whistle. The first few times this happened I looked for an in-movie explanation.

It’s all pretty silly for a supposedly serious film—and the meandering plot with the magical glowing poison straight out of Re-Animator only adds to that—but that’s much of the fun. If your film is going to be nuts, go for it, and it is clear that’s the plan as soon as Frank shows up in the homicide department and responds to the question of who was murdered with an extended pause and then, “I was.” Cue horn blast.

D.O.A. is a B-movie. Gone is the beauty-in-sickness of the early Film Noirs, not to mention decent film stock. This is an ugly movie. Rumor has it that the street scenes were shot guerrilla-style—without permits and with perplexed crowds—which I believe as a controlled shoot would show some concern for lighting. That low-budget feel helps the film. We’re never going to get involved with the characters nor look at this as art. This is low grade, joyful exploitation. All of D.O.A.’s failings make it better, except for the relationship material. Nothing with Frank and Paula works, mainly because their dialog is neither realistic or witty. They constantly make proclamations which are obvious and uncomfortable. But after a few minutes with her, we’re back to some skeezy location with two or three low-lifes and everything is OK. D.O.A. is not a good film, but it is a fun one, and sometimes that’s fine.

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