Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950) has a clever high-concept exterior and a grimy thematic underbelly. Unfortunately, those two are glued together with a nonsensical plot and drab characterization and dialogue. Still Maté’s moody visuals and a frenetically despairing performance by Edmond O’Brien keeps you focused on the surface pleasures rather than on the malfunctioning internal organs. And then, at some point, you realize that the malfunction is perhaps endemic to noir fantasies which have to condemn the antisocial fantasies their audience is there to consume.
Notary public Frank Bigelow (O’Brien) of Banning, CA, runs off on a sudden vacation to San Francisco to escape his blonde, clingy secretary/girlfriend Paula (Pamela Britton). While on a bar crawl with new friends, he’s improbably poisoned when someone switches his drink; doctors tell him that he’s got a week at most to live. The rest of the film’s a fever dream of blind alleys and dead ends as Bigelow’s effort to find his killer leads him to Los Angeles and from there into a noir maze of underworld thuggery, sultry femme fatales, and impressively filmed dramatic shadows.
In typical noir fashion a worn-out, desperate Bigelow tells his story in flashback to the cops; with his last words he laments that he was killed just for notarizing a piece of paper. That’s technically true; the creaky and labyrinthine plot involves a suicide which would be revealed as a murder if a notarized bill of sale in Bigelow’s hands were to surface. Bigelow’s a random dude who’s been entangled in a nightmare of happenstance and bad luck. His character-actor bland jowls show that he is an innocent man.
That’s the rational explanation for Bigelow’s plight. But there’s also a less innocent dream logic. In running away from wholesome marriage to his virtuous blonde secretary, Bigelow turns his back on order and virtue. His sexual interest in every woman he passes in San Francisco is played for laughs. But his walk on the seedier side also slides swiftly and remorselessly into the world of noir criminality—loose women, hot jazz, gunplay.
Bigelow takes to brutality like some dark, bloated fish; he strong-arms women (innocent and guilty), trades blows with psychopathic henchmen (the Joker-esque Neville Brand), and threatens death with a glib, heavy certainty. You’d think if you had a day or so to live, you’d spend it with your loved ones and leave the criminal investigation to the cops. But Bigelow doesn’t consider returning to Paula for a moment. When she shows up in Los Angeles, he declares his love in unconvincing dialogue, and then tells her to wait in the hotel lobby, promising he’ll return though he knows he never will.
Critic Foster Hirsch, in an enthusiastic review of the film, writes that the poisoning “involves Bigelow in his life more forcefully than he has ever been before” and that “discovering the reason for his death—turns out to be the triumph of his life.” But that’s only true if you think that threatening to throw a woman off a balcony means you’re more involved in your life than marrying your true love, or if you think it’s a triumph to spend the last moments of your existence doing some cop’s job for him rather than spending time with people you care about.
Is the viewer supposed to think that seamy violence is a better deal than a mundane life? Is Bigelow? As in It’s a Wonderful Life, the main character’s descent into rage and borderline madness makes you wonder if the hearty guy who showed up at the beginning was just a mask. Maybe the movie isn’t Bigelow’s nightmare. Maybe it’s a kind of perverse fantasy—a boring lug’s wish to be a rumpled, vicious Humphrey Bogart.
In some sense, you can’t blame Bigelow for not wanting to settle down with Paula; she has no apparent personality outside of her repetitive demands that her chosen spouse match her constant declarations of infatuation. But if we’re in Bigelow’s head, then Paula’s there too; she’s a caricature of nagging domesticity because Bigelow sees commitment in terms of nagging domesticity. If Paula seems like a fate worse than death, it’s because Bigelow’s convinced himself he’d rather die than be the person who could marry her.
The Lady Gambles condemns gambling, but the scenes of gambling are energized in a way that the scenes of heterosexual bliss aren’t. Similarly, Bigelow’s murder is supposed to be a tragedy, but without that murder you don’t have the movie, and Bigelow is just some notary public rather than a hard-boiled, brutal, compelling leading man. You wouldn’t think that being randomly poisoned would function as an empowerment fantasy. But in the exploitation world of noir, the fun doesn’t start till the schlub is D.O.A.