D.O.A.

In Russell Rouse’s original screenplay for D.O.A., director Rudolph Mate had a fantastic premise to build on: a distraught man arrives at a police station to report his own murder, which the police appear to have been expecting. Edmond O’Brien plays Frank Bigelow, an accountant who leaves his girlfriend, Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton), for a week while he takes a vacation by himself in San Francisco, where he gets drugged at a wild jazz club (with a truly fantastic band). Turns out he ingested a slow-acting poison and may only have a day to live, which sets him off on his own complicated (for some, over-complicated) investigation in the hopes of saving his own life. Generally considered a low-budget classic, D.O.A. doesn’t hold up as well as many other noirs, in part due to some mechanical acting; at times, the film feels like a cheesy 1950’s sci-fi flick. Dimitri Tiomkin’s soundtrack and Ernest Lazslo’s cinematography do wonders, however, especially during the famous sequence in which Bigelow sprints desperately through the streets of San Francisco, both running from and running toward his fate, with Tiomkin’s crashing Rachmaninoff-like piano chords beautifully expressing his pain.