D.O.A.: Small Town Man Visits Big City, Murder Follows

Frank Gerstle, Edmond O’Brien, “D.O.A.” (1949).
The doctor delivers some astonishingly bad news.

Frank Bigelow needs to find the truth,
but he's driven by a deeper motivation

By Paul Parcellin

When you think of noir, it’s probably not 18th century British author Samuel Johnson who first springs to mind. But his most famous quote really nails the crux of “D.O.A.”: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Apt words for Frank Bigelow ( Edmond O’Brien), the cursed hero of “D.O.A.,” who is under a death sentence, but not the kind that involves a rope. His is a story of rotten luck, an obsessive search for the truth and the mind’s nimbleness as the final grains of sand funnel through the hourglass.

But first, the top reason to see “D.O.A.” is the opening sequence, perhaps the greatest setup in all of noir. Bigelow arrives at Los Angeles City Hall at night, as if drawn in by its illuminated spire, a beacon in the dark. He enters and makes the long trudge through the hallways leading to police headquarters and the camera follows him all the way. Arriving at the homicide bureau, he reports a murder.

Detective: Who was murdered?
Bigelow: I was.

“Who was murdered?” the head detective asks. 

“I was,” he says.

Thus begins one of noir’s most definitive existential crises. A man living under a death sentence has mere hours before he expires. What will he do with his remaining time, we wonder? The lowdown comes in a long flashback in which we learn that the past few days have been a frenzied struggle. Bigelow, a small town accountant, first got sucked into a dark vortex of doom some months ago, long before he realized his predicament. He accidentally landed in the middle a scheme to sell stolen iridium, a valuable metal. He’s innocent of any wrongdoing, but fate cares not about culpability. 

Details of the story behind this delayed-action murder get a bit complicated and difficult to digest as the story winds toward its harrowing conclusion. But the backstory is less important than Bigelow’s frenetic struggle to get to the bottom of the mystery that torments him to distraction. 

At the story’s core is a powerful obsession with finding the truth and a frenzied investigation that seems imperative, yet pointless. He could have gone to the police immediately but chose to go it alone. You might correctly assume that Bigelow’s head-first dive into the nitty gritty of the case is his way of shutting out thoughts of the Angel of Death’s inevitable visit.

His downward spiral begins when he leaves his loving girlfriend, Paula (Pamela Britton), behind in their small desert town. Frank plans to let down his hair in the big city, San Francisco, while deciding whether or not he will walk the plank with Paula — a plan that, frankly, is a bit on the cruel side. She hates the idea of him cavorting around town, yet feels she has no choice but to let him go get his freak on.

House band, The Fishermen, drive the beatnik crowd to distraction.

Once in the confines of his big city hotel room he’s up for a bit of sinning, and it turns out he’s come to the right place. By chance, he meets a group of traveling salespeople who are partying like it’s V-J Day, and he’s invited to join the fun. 

“Jive-crazy” hipsters dig
the crazy beat at
the Fisherman jazz club.

Drink flows freely and this group of inveterate squares lands at a beatnik jazz bar, of all places. It’s the film’s most surreal and fun sequences as the hep crowd grooves to the frenzied beat of a live sextet blowing hard bop.

Clearly, it’s a square’s idea of what a jazz club is like. The joint is a cartoonish den of iniquity where loose morals and uninhibited self-expression are on display, a place where oddballs and commies probably smoke “marihuana.” Above all of that, it’s a spot to meet “jive crazy” girls, and Frank’s game for that.

Of course, he’s out of his element here. The music makes his head spin, but the possibility of connecting with some counter-culture female companionship makes it tolerable. When at last he’s about to hook up with a mysterious blonde, someone slips him a radioactive mickey that sends his life into a tailspin.

It’s as if he’s being punished for his carnal cravings, and the penalty for straying from his girlfriend is death. But beyond that, we wonder who fed him a nightcap of hot nuclear soup. 

We’re left to ponder whether the raucous group that brought him to the bar had any part in the scheme. After all, the head sales nerd persuaded Bigelow to join the group and organized the bar hop. He’s got his wife in tow and at one point he gives Bigelow the stink eye for getting too cosy with the missus — a rather weak motive for murder, but people have killed for less.

It’s not until the next morning that Bigelow realizes that something is off and gets himself examined. The terrifying verdict is in: he’s been dosed with a slow-acting luminous poison and has only several days left to live. 

A couple of medical establishments confirm that he’s a goner, and at first he’s in denial. From the dimly lit confines of a physician’s office, Bigelow bolts into the vast, sun-filled concrete cityscape that is somehow as claustrophobic and airless as the doctor’s office. He’s a man trying to outrun fate and it’s hard not to gasp for breath along with him as he scrambles toward points unknown. 

Pamela Britton, O’Brien. Frank and Paula meetup, all too briefly.

A cool factoid is that the shots of Bigelow running down San Francisco’s Market Street were taken without city permits. Those he bumps into are not hired extras but pedestrians who are visibly confused about the jostling they get. Director Rudolph Maté shot the film on a small budget, around $500,000, and made the most of limited resources. 

Frank ponders Life.

We witness Bigelow go through the stages of impending death in an extremely compressed timeframe. Pausing at a newsstand bedecked with copies of Life magazine, he watches people interact, but he seems all but invisible to them. He’s like an apparition who observes others but cannot interact with them. His initial terror dissipates and he seems to be wistfully picturing a world in which life will go on without him.

Once the initial shock is absorbed he accepts the bitter reality and snaps into action. In his final hours he’s determined to find out who poisoned him and why they did it. And then … who knows what? Maybe he’ll bring the killer to justice or perhaps he’ll take matters into his own hands. Along the way he acquires a pistol, so both options are open.

This is a drastically different Bigelow than the one who embarked on his junket to San Francisco. He’s focused, emotionally high strung and determined to get answers. 

The film's climax takes place in the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles.

His investigation takes him abruptly from the Bay Area to the City of Angels, and at every turn he encounters another mug or two-timing dame. As the dust begins to settle it becomes clear that there’s a network of people behind the plot against him. But why would they go to so much trouble to kill an accountant from jerkwater USA?

The film’s answer is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but not quite as byzantine as “The Big Sleep,” perhaps the most convoluted plot in all of noir. 

Neville Brand as Chester. He takes
Frank Bigelow for a wild ride.

Bigelow traces the iridium dealers, meets the widow of the man who tried to warn him about impending danger and tracks down the shady characters behind the illegal sale. He gets taken for a ride by psychotic thug Chester (Neville Brand), and survives a shootout in a pharmacy. 

Bigelow’s mind has become wonderfully focused as the shadow of death hovers over him. He later expires in the homicide bureau after spilling the story to a roomful of enthralled detectives.

Facing certain death can clear cobwebs from the brain, all right, but too often clarity arrives at the eleventh hour.  It’s ironic that had he not gone through this ordeal he might never have realized his feelings for Paula, but by then it was too late. Alas, romance often doesn’t work out in noir. 

Frank Bigelow gains a sliver of self awareness only to die an untimely death. That’s a Pyrrhic victory you might say, and Samuel Johnson would undoubtedly agree.

Originally published in the Nov./Dec. 2024 issue of The Dark Pages. Check out The Dark Pages newsletter at: www.allthatnoir.com/newsletter/

Paul Parcellin writes about crime films and TV. Follow him on Bluesky: @paulpar.bsky.social 

Jazz Mania: Film Noir, Bebop and the Devil’s Music

Elisha Cook Jr., 'Phantom Lady' (1944)

You might be surprised to learn that jazz didn’t show up in film noir right away even though by the 1940s swing was part of the popular music landscape and bebop was well on its way to becoming a solid American art form. But you wouldn’t know it by watching “The Maltese Falcon” and other early noir offerings. 

The fact is, initially at least, film noir producers didn’t seem to dig that style of freewheeling music. Typically, they played it safe, sticking with traditional orchestral arrangements instead of cool improvisational compositions played by hip bands and small combos. In short, when it came to music, Hollywood establishment cats were squares.

A couple of noir films finally presented a scene or two of jazz musicians doing their thing, but in both cases the music serves as a backdrop that fairly drips of sex, drugs, crime and madness — in other words, good, if overheated, material for a crime drama, but unflattering to the musical genre itself.

Ella Raines, Elisha Cook Jr., "Phantom Lady"

For openers, “Phantom Lady” (1944) offers a strange, mesmerizing view of an impromptu basement jam session. It may not have been jazz’s first appearance in noir, but it sticks in the memory. 

Based on the Cornell Woolrich novel of the same title, “Phantom Lady”  is a nightmarish odyssey that takes place over a single night. The story involves a woman’s hat, which becomes the object of an obsessive hunt that leads to run-ins with dangerous characters in shadowy corners of an unforgiving urban sprawl. 

Carol Richman (Ella Raines) crosses paths with Cliff (Elisha Cook Jr.), the drummer in a pit orchestra. They flirt and he brings her to an after hours jam session. Cliff sits in with the other musicians and the scene’s centerpiece is his drum solo, a performance that is a none-too-subtle expression of sexual  desire — Cliff is the one whose temperature rises to the boiling point, while Carol plays along in hope of getting vital information from him. 

He pounds out a frenzied solo on a trap set, his maniacal, leering expression, aimed at Carol, registers a 10 on the creep meter. Cliff later figures out that Carol has been leading him on and she splits before there’s any trouble, leaving Cliff to catch his breath and take a cold shower.

Then there’s the nightclub scene in “D.O.A.” (1949), which gives us a cartoonish rendition of both jazz and the kookie audience that grooves on the stuff. 

Frank Gerstle, Edmond O'Brien, 'D.O.A.' (1949)

Above all else, “D.O.A.” is a sobering, paranoid meditation on nuclear radiation’s deadly effects on the human race, and the pitfalls of self-absorption and hedonism. Small-town accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) comes to the big city and by chance meets a bunch of traveling salesmen and their lady companions who are all staying at his hotel. They persuade him to come to a bar and it turns out to be a hipster scene. 

Frank, a bit of a square, came to San Francisco to let his hair down before making up his mind whether or not to propose to his sweetheart back home. So he’s tantalized to check out this pre-beatnik era hangout for the bohemian set. He mingles with a lady at the bar and makes a date to meet her later that night. All the while a jazz combo is blowing up a storm on the bandstand. The excitement builds until the musicians and the crowd are in a frenzied state. The nightclub practically levitates as both the band and club patrons get caught up in the frenzied beat to the point of madness. 

The bartender, inured to the cacophony, shrugs it off. They’re “jive crazy," he says. "That means they go for this stuff.”

Frank doesn’t much understand the hipster crowd, but it looks like he’s gotten lucky, and that plus the booze are clouding his better judgment. He’s too distracted to pay much attention to the man slipping something into his drink. He takes a big sip of his tainted cocktail and things start to go sideways.

Swinging in San Francisco, 'D.O.A.'

Like the scene in “Phantom Lady,” an infectious rhythm dominates the action like a swift current carrying small crafts toward the edge of a waterfall. Both films seem to be saying that jazz is not only background music for bad behavior, it’s perhaps a catalyst for it. And while both scenes border on self parody, they are oddly striking, maybe even iconic. 

The action and cross-cutting is thrilling and mind-bending. The hyped-up, cartoonish performances may not be an accurate depiction of how real jazz is played — although, of the two, “Phantom Lady” comes closer to the real McCoy — but in each case the music becomes a powerful antagonistic force that tests the heroes’ mettle. Personally speaking, those are two gigs that I wouldn’t mind attending, martini in hand.

SIDEBAR:

In later years Hollywood got hip to modern music, and jazz held a more exalted position in noir. Here are a handful of memorable performances.

“Gilda” (1946). More of a big band performance than modern jazz, Rita Hayworth wows them with a smoldering rendition of  “Put the Blame on Mame.”

“Sweet Smell of Success” (1957), featuring a performance by the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

“Elevator to the Gallows” (1957), score by Miles Davis.

“I Want to Live” (1957), score by Johnny Mandel and Gerry Mulligan.

“Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959), score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.  

I’d venture to guess that there are more that belong on the list. Which are your favorites?