SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, you may not want to read further until you’ve seen it.

Unlike the film noir I discussed in my recent blog, Double Indemnity, which was an A-list film featuring major Hollywood actors and given a fairly large budget by Paramount, D.O.A. was produced by a short-lived ‘Poverty Row’ company who saw it as a cheap-as-chips B-film in the days when cinema audiences got two pictures for the price of one. If the artists who created Double Indemnity might be surprised that people still watch it eighty years on despite its being nominated for seven Academy awards (winning none), the artists who created D.O.A. would be absolutely astonished to find that their movie is now preserved in the US National Film Register and has become a favourite of so many noir fans.

One of the key differences between the two films is the year of their release. Although Wikipedia and IMDb disagree on this (the former listing it as 1950 and the latter as 1949), whichever date is correct, the five years or so between Double Indemnity and D.O.A. had seen a development in this kind of urban thriller, with scenes often being staged outside the studio lot in real public spaces in cities like L.A. and New York, a long way from the studio sets of the earliest noirs such as The Maltese Falcon (1941). This move towards documentary realism happened in many of the best films in the era of classic film noir: T-Men (1947), The Naked City (1948), The Third Man (1949), Night and the City (1950), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) are just a few of the films which were shot in real urban settings and the background of their cities became like an extra character in the films. While Double Indemnity has some scenes shot outside the studio, it has nowhere near as many as D.O.A., which turns San Francisco and Los Angeles into an integral part of the film.

The movie tells the story of a small-town businessman, Frank Bigelow, who plans to take a vacation to San Francisco, partly to get some time away from his girlfriend, Paula. In a typically complex film noir plot which is difficult to follow as we watch, his drink in a bar is spiked with ‘luminous toxin’, a poison that glows in the dark and leads to an inevitable and speedy death. The rest of the movie shows his desperate attempt in the tiny time available to him (a single day) to find out who has killed him and why, and takes him to another urban destination, Los Angeles, where he dies in the final scene, having told his story to the officers at the homicide department.

D.O.A and Double Indemnity have similar dramatic beginnings in both content and imagery. Both show a man from behind struggling to walk through the corridors and doors of a large, bureaucratic building: in D.O.A, the central L.A. police station. He tells the detective in charge that he wants to report a murder, the detective asks him who was murdered, and Bigelow states, ‘I was.’ A clever opening, and typical of the way this type of B-list film made the most of its budget limitations through good, tough scripts and imaginative cinematography. Although there is no voiceover or flashback in D.O.A, Bigelow’s reportage of events has the same effect as Neff speaking into his dictaphone in Double Indemnity. It creates the sense of a pre-destined outcome which we are about to witness, and noir’s endless obsession with the fickleness and inevitability of Fate, which I would personally see as its most defining characteristic, and is why I prefer to call noir a ‘mood’ rather than a ‘genre’ or a ‘style’. Sinner, saint, or Average Jane or Joe, we are all puppets in the hands of Fate.

At the root of D.O.A. lies one of noir’s favourite dichotomies: dull suburban security versus the edge and danger of big-city life. This is spelt out very clearly in early discussions between Bigelow and Paula; he wants to go to San Francisco alone, while she tries various ruses to get him to take her along. She is uncertain whether it is better to accept that he have a final fling before he is ready to settle down or put her cards on the table and demand that he take her with him if he truly loves her. One moment she is trying to be broad-minded and give him space; in the next she almost begs him to marry her and settle down in Banning, their sleepy, predictable hometown.  

These early scenes of them together in Banning are dull and slow-paced, but the moment Frank’s plane touches down in San Francisco, the mood and pace changes in a flash. The rest of the movie bursts with energy, most of it supplied by O’Brien who injects a manic desperation into the action as things heat up. The first picture we see of San Francisco is a hotel where business trippers on a jolly are holding a wild, drunken party in the room next to O’Brien’s. These brief hotel scenes, however, include something which is almost universally panned by critics as clunky and ill-advised: the whistle-like sound that appears every time that Frank sees a sexy young woman, a rising tone that sounds more appropriate to a cartoon, perhaps meant as a joky aural suggestion of arousal. I must concur that the first time I saw the movie, I shared most viewers’ reaction to this incongruous and silent-comedy attempt at humour; however, I have watched the movie so many times now that I can block out the unfortunate tweets.

The scene that really announces that Bigelow is now in the grip of the big bad city and far from the calm of Banning is the one where he is taken to a jazz club called the Fisherman. This scene is very similar to one from an earlier noir, Phantom Lady (1944), in which the expressionistic underbelly of noir is let rip and exposed to the full. The scene is a montage of images of musicians blasting out raucous jazz. Jazz is a common musical genre in noir, both the slinky, romantic jazz of nightclub chanteuses and the cacophony of jazz bands in wild full flow, because it serves as a symbol of the seductive and the primitive and the sheer Otherness of its non-suburban world. Notably, and I won’t dwell on this racial politics in this essay, it is an African-American world. It is in the Fisherman that the poison is slipped into Bigelow’s drink.

The rest of the film is fast and furious, as Bigelow learns that he has ingested a poison (luminous toxin) that is going to kill him within a few short hours and he tries to find out who poisoned him and why. It is a huge credit to O’Brien that he is able to inject so much energy into the scenes that follow: if there is one overriding image for me of D.O.A it is that of Bigelow running through city centre streets (a common motif in some noirs, perhaps most impressively in Night and the City, set in London, whose protagonist spends much of his time trying to escape people he has made enemies of in his failed get-rich-quick schemes). One scene in D.O.A. was actually cut on a main street where the pedestrians didn’t know that a film was being made, where O’Brien collided into genuine shoppers as he hurtled helter-skelter along the pavement, giving the scene a splash of real confusion and chaos.

The rest of the film from this point focuses on delivering the plot and shows Bigelow ricocheting from place to place, coming up against a group of low-life criminals who are all in some way connected to the main scam which centres on a document which Bigelow has notarised. This, unknown to him, would prove that an innocent man did not commit suicide but was actually murdered in order to keep the illegal sale of radioactive iridium hidden from public view. These dips into the criminal underworld of Los Angeles are interspersed with phone calls from Paula back in Banning, which serve the purpose of giving facts that advance the plot but also keep alive the central thematic contrast of big city wickedness versus wholesome, hometown decency and of the loyal girl-next-door against a coven of serpentine femme fatales. 

I won’t attempt to outline the twists and turns in the plot in all their detail because they would take up a lot of space and would probably be hard (and tedious) for the reader to follow: suffice it to say that Bigelow soon finds out that no one can be trusted in this nest of vipers. He learns that notarising what had seemed a routine document is the act that cost him his life and eventually meets the man at the top of this dungheap, a stereotypically stylish and sophisticated master-criminal with the suspicious, foreign-sounding name of Majak (one name only). With the customary faux-regret of this kind of sensitive villain who cannot bear to be around to witness suffering, he says a sad farewell to Bigelow and despatches him from his presence in the company of the hoodlum, Chester.

Chester, played by Neville Brand, is one of the great sadistic psychos in the annals of film noir. There was something about Brand’s features and demeanour that made him perfect for this type of role and he repeated it several times in noir, but nowhere else is he allowed to be as over-the-top as this: in a more stylish piece of work it might come across as coarse or even laughable, but somehow in this cheap B-feature it is perfect. As he drives the car to the place where he intends to torture Bigelow to death, his eyes gleam with pleasure and anticipation as he smirks, ‘I’m going to enjoy this’ and reminds Bigelow how being ‘shot in the belly’ is the slowest and most painful way to die. (The irony, of course, is that Bigelow is already dying because of the luminous toxin in his stomach – indeed, the ‘belly’ is an interesting recurring motif in the script that might merit some psychoanalytical attention.) While Chester continues to obsess about shooting Bigelow in his belly, he loses his focus and attention and Bigelow takes his chance to slam his foot down on the brakes and escapes into a local department store. Chester follows and begins to open fire at random on the people shopping there, and is quickly despatched by police who arrive, before we see our latest shots of Bigelow hotfooting it down yet more city streets to his next destination.

As I’ve already mentioned, the character of Paula is a cliché in many noirs: the faithful, loving girlfriend or wife who is there as a moral contrast to the selfish, calculating femme fatale (or in this case, several femmes fatales.) In step with the tone of this movie, her depiction as good-girl-next-door is slightly excessive in my opinion, and I wonder how viewers of the time reacted to her. To many modern-day audiences, I suspect, she comes across as a little supine and needy and desperate in her relationship with Bigelow, what many would disparagingly call a doormat. For most of the film she bombards him with phone calls, with lots of close-ups of the joy on her face when he tells her that he loves her and then her eventually delight when he finally gives in and says she should take the money from their account to come and join him in L.A. I am unsure whether audiences of that time would have seen her as simply admirably loyal or whether they also might have seen her as rather clinging. As with almost everything in this film there is an exaggeration to the plot and the acting style that is one step away from caricature at times, and I suspect many viewers, especially nowadays, might find the whole thing a little too cartoonish to suspend their disbelief.

This brings us to the ‘luminous toxic substance’ that Bigelow unknowingly ingests. There is a scene at a doctor’s surgery where the medical officer shows him a test-tube of a liquid, turns off the light, and the audience can see it glow. For many viewers whose preference is for strict realism, I suspect, this might be the point at which they can no longer ignore what they see as the Scooby Doo aspects of the movie. The director, though, seems to take the challenge full on. At the end of the film as the titles roll, the following words come up: ‘The medical facts in this motion picture are authentic’, and ‘Luminous toxin is a descriptive term for an actual poison’, followed by the name and signature of an MD. You have to give credit to the director, Mate, for his chutzpah.

I’m not claiming that D.O.A. is a great film, but I do have enormous admiration for the inventive, outrageous plot and the sheer energy that thrusts the action forward like a whirlwind and makes many people, including me, somehow accept its various oddities and overstatement. And in terms of its key message, it is undeniably pure noir. The last thing Bigelow says to the policeman just before he dies is that all he did was notarise ‘one little paper out of hundreds,’ and because of that innocent act he was doomed by an indifferent Fate. The detective then stamps the official police file on the deceased protagonist with the acronym, ‘D.O.A.’