D.O.A.

The opening bluntly establishes the protagonist's mission as a sweltering Borges fever. "Who was murdered?" "I was." The schmoe (Edmond O'Brien) is a small-time accountant rather uneasy about commitment, "a little vacation" away from his sweetheart (Pamela Britton) turns out to be a wake-up call with curious anticipations of North by Northwest. (The aspiring bon vivant is set straight by villains who tinker with his drink.) The San Francisco hotel he checks into is a boys' club, the jive dive he visits is a hepcat inferno, the Reaper is a trenchcoated figure switching glasses at the counter. The morning after finds him with a swirling stomach, a visit to the hospital reveals a system full of "luminous toxin." The hangover as death sentence? Rudolph Maté marshals all the cinematographic resources learned from Dreyer for this nightmare, Vampyr in particular comes in handy for the tale of the walking dead seeking answers. A furious tracking shot follows O'Brien running through a crowd down Market Street, exhausted he leans against a newsstand and gazes up at the orb blazing indifferently in the sky. (Life magazines are stacked by his side in a mordant little gag.) A notarized bill of sale and a suicide comprise the tangle, the doomed fellow scrambles to decipher it by working backwards, into the Los Angeles underworld. Along the way are gangland ghouls, the urbane capo (Luther Adler) and the psychotic torpedo (Neville Brand), toothy grin flashing as he savors the thought of putting a bullet in the hero's belly. "An unfortunate boy... He's unhappy unless he's giving pain." Cocteau's "death at work," quite the noir distillate for the square bachelor who goes from staring at dames to dodging bullets. An extraordinarily direct trauma: The story is recounted and, once it's finished, the teller keels over. With Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, and Laurette Luez. In black and white.