D.O.A. (Harry M. Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures, United Artists, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 22) I was going to run my husband Charles and I the Blu-Ray disc of the 1953 3-D Western Wings of the Hawk, directed by Budd Boetticher for Universal-International and starring Van Heflin and Julie Adams (the latter the damsel in distress that attracted the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the first of Universal’s three series entries), but we didn’t have 3-D glasses ready to hand (I ordered some from Amazon.com this morning and expect them to arrive Thursday) and I couldn’t figure out how to select the alternate 2-D version of the movie. So instead I put that aside and we watched the original 1949 version of D.O.A., a haunting movie that has held a certain level of audience’s imagination for its unique and bizarre central premise. Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) takes an out-of-town trip to San Francisco and ends up in a pub crawl, where a mystery assailant slips a poison called “luminous toxin” into one of his drinks. The next day he goes to a doctor and is told that the poison has already worked its way into his system and rendered him fatally ill; he’s told he has anywhere from a day to a week to live. He decides to use the time he has to find out who killed him – one of the film’s greatest moments is when one of the doctors who diagnoses him asks how he got the poison, he says, “I don’t know,” and the doctor takes a beat and then says, “You’ve been murdered.” Bigelow is a tax accountant from the desert town of Banning, California (which really exists) and he went on that fatal vacation to San Francisco to get away from Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton), his fiancée and secretary.

The film was directed by French émigré and former cinematographer Rudolph Maté from a story and screenplay by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene. It was produced by Harry M. Popkin and his brother Leo C. Popkin, who got their start in the film business producing “race movies” (films with all-Black casts aimed at Black-only theatres) in 1941 and later graduated to movies aimed at white audiences. Apparently the idea for D.O.A. first came from German screenwriter Robert Thoeren in 1932, but it seems either to have never got filmed then or to have been one of those daring projects, like the original 1933 Viktor und Viktoria, that fell through the cracks when the Nazis took over Germany and imposed their dictatorship on the arts as well as everything else. So it’s not surprising that a movie made in Hollywood at the height of the film noir craze would have its ultimate roots in Weimar Republic Germany. The 1949 D.O.A. has one big problem: the musical score by Dmitri Tiomkin, who drenched it in goo and whose most annoying affectation is the sound of a slide whistle every time Frank Bigelow is tempted by a hot-looking woman in his hotel (the St. Francis) in San Francisco, which is often since he arrives in town at the close of “Market Week,” a week-long convention in which male clothing salesmen attract the attention of women buyers for department stores. (In 1932 Warner Bros. had made a quite good film, She Had to Say Yes, about the lives of women in those jobs and how they literally had to prostitute themselves to get orders, though that film reversed the genders and the women were the fashion reps who “had to say yes” to the male department store buyers who had the power to make or break them by ordering from them or not.)

Just before Bigelow left on his weekend out of town, a man named Phillips frantically called him but wouldn’t tell Paula who he was or what he wanted. It turns out Phillips’ wife (Lynn Baggett) was having an affair with the company’s comptroller, Halliday (William Ching). Phillips ran an export-import company headquartered in Los Angeles’s famed Bradbury Building, which appeared in so many films noir it was practically noir central. The two, along with Phillips’s mistress Marla Rakubian (Laurette Luez) and her brother Raymond, who posed as a man named “Jennings,” were in a plot to frame Phillips for receiving stolen property, the said property being a shipment of the rare metal iridium. Frank Bigelow got involved because on his way back to L.A. from making the iridium transaction, Phillips stopped in Banning and had Bigelow notarize the receipt for the metal. With Bigelow’s help, Phillips could have proved that he bought the iridium in what seemed like a legitimate transaction and thereby escaped prosecution for receiving stolen property. Instead Mrs. Phillips pushed her husband off the balcony of their apartment and thereby murdered him, while Halliday went to San Francisco, sneaked into the bar and poisoned Bigelow’s drink. D.O.A. is a quite remarkable movie noticeable for having been largely shot on actual locations – one scene with Bigelow fleeing both crooks and cops through the streets was a “stolen” shot with the passers-by unaware that they were being filmed for a movie – and for an explosive shock cut to the scene at “The Fisherman” bar, where Halliday catches up to Bigelow and poisons him.

“The Fisherman” is called that because it has a band featuring a honking tenor saxophonist who uses that name, and it’s nice to know who the band members are at long last: Van Streeter (tenor sax) as “The Fisherman”; Teddy Buckner (trumpet); Ray Laurie (piano); John Willie “Shifty” Henry (bass); and Al “Cake” Wichard (drums). It’s also noticeable as the first film appearance of actor Neville Brand, who played a psychopathic killer named Chester; Brand recalled years later that he’d been a struggling actor in New York City when Harry and Leo Popkin offered him a large amount of money for this film, plus free transportation from New York to Los Angeles and back. Brand made so much more money on this film than he’d ever made as a stage actor that he decided to stay in Hollywood; he had a solid, if not exactly stellar, career in 1950’s films, mostly “B”’s in which he played heavies. (His best movie was probably Riot in Cell Block 11, directed by Don Siegel in 1954, in which he played a convict who leads a prison revolt.) I’m not sure D.O.A. in 2024 is quite as amazing a movie as I thought it was when I first saw it on local TV in the late 1960’s, but it’s still a quite exciting and moving film. I especially like the scenes in which Brand’s Chester is trying to threaten O’Brien’s Bigelow, and Bigelow couldn’t care less because he’s fatally ill anyway, as well as the final sequence in which the missing-persons report on Bigelow is stamped “D.O.A.” – “dead on arrival” – as he finally expires inside the L.A. Police Department’s homicide unit, where he’s narrated the story in flashback. And Edmond O’Brien’s performance is superb as the Everyman literally not only caught but killed by the noir underworld, even though when Pamela Britton’s character got jealous and possessive over him and worried that he was having extra-relational activities with one or more of the girls in San Francisco, I couldn’t help but remember that four years later O’Brien would play the title role in Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist.