"I'd like to report a murder.""Who was murdered?"
"I was."
With that Edmond O'Brien (star of Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist) opens Rudolph Mate's 1949 noir masterpiece told in flashback that follows O'Brien's Frank Bigelow--an accountant, notary, and bachelor whose drink is spiked with "luminous poisoning" while on a vacation from his otherwise forgettable secretary and love interest Pamela Britton--from Banning to San Francisco to Los Angeles. The shadowy nighttime location shooting and interior cinematography was handled by Robert Aldrich-regular Ernest Laszlo in collaboration with the Krakow-born Mate, whose own career as a cinematographer spanned famously from Vampyr (1932) to Gilda (1946). Like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, Mate was among the many artists and filmmakers who exiled their lives to Hollywood during Hitler's rise in Europe during the late-1930s. The original film was firmly set in postwar America (unlike the 1988 remake starring Dennis Quaid and Charlotte Rampling) by both hinting at some unspoken pseudo-atomic destruction centering around a mysterious man named Majak and a stolen shipment of iridium, a dense metal that has been used for military projects (though not on atomic or nuclear weaponry) and containing a brilliant scene at a beatnik-era jazz and jive club called The Fisherman. Listed with the National Film Registry, D.O.A. contains period footage of the Bradbury Building on Broadway in Downtown L.A., and was guaranteed "scientifically accurate" by a medical advisor in the closing credits.
