March towards fate
D.O.A. is an irritatingly near-great film. Rudolph Maté’s direction puts its head down and charges ahead, utilising location photography with a dexterity and invention that is quite brilliant for its time, and stands as a stark reminder that in this cinematic period the real cinematic energy and invention in Hollywood was flowing out of the noir genre, whilst the pasteboard studio era was beginning its decline. Some sequences, like the genuinely swinging jazz club scene, and when Luther Adler and his thugs pursue O’Brien on a bus, are close to filmic genius.
At The Fisherman’sThe uniquely dark plot presents a grim parable as everyday businessman Edmond O’Brien takes a vacation from his life and girlfriend, seeking kicks and sex, and instead finds himself taking a very quick elevator ride to oblivion, attempting, in his last hours, to make his life count for something.
Strangers in town beware, of men with scarves and the old radioactive metallic poison in the drink gag.
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The narrative rush is riveting and the screenplay intriguingly adult, as O’Brien’s hero, when still alive and well, is weak, vacillating, vain in a masculine fashion, and experiencing what we now call commitment issues.
Luminous death
He’s implicated in a post-War culture whose horizon is a bunch of boozed-up travelling salesmen and the women they’re trying to race off, feeding off the hipster scene for excitement whilst rejecting its aesthetics. It’s only when he’s dying that he becomes energetic, decisive, inventive, and blessed with self-knowledge – it’s one of the cinema’s ultimate existential statements.
O’Brien’s panic-ridden flight through the city was shot seceretly on location; pedestrians really had no idea why this loony was barging through them.
It’s a pity it can’t help lurching into breathless over-acting, especially in O’Brien’s scenes with girl Friday Pamela Britton, where the dialogue becomes anxiously florid. And then there’s that godforsaken slide-whistle that recurs throughout the film’s early sections, a would-be droll acknowledgement of sexual arousal, utterly dreadful in practise. Neville Brand, in his first credited role, is a hoot as crazy goon Chester, and future trash film starlet Beverly Garland plays a jazznik femme fatale.
Femme fatale Beverly Garland – they couldn’t get Susan Cabot
Neville Brand as loony gunsel Chester
Maté, a veteran cinematography who had worked wth Dreyer (such as on the infamous Michael, 1924, and The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1929) and a recent directorial graduate, wouldn’t make another film nearly as memorable, although the same location-based intensity does partly stoke his 300 Spartans (1962).
Revenge – the finale occurs in LA’s Bradbury Building, site of another memorable noir confrontation, in Blade Runner
