User reviews

The gimmick here is that an accountant is given a slow-acting poison and tries to track down his own killer. The premise is intriguing but the execution is terrible. As the victim, O'Brien, a fine supporting actor, doesn't have the charisma to carry the film. This B movie is incredibly cheesy. When the hero gets near women at a convention, there are wolf whistles on the sound track to convey his lecherous thoughts. The scenes where the doctors reveal that he is slowly dying is very poorly filmed, and the poison glows in the dark! The acting is uniformly terrible and the direction is completely incompetent. It is amazing that this turkey has come to be regarded as classic.

Released in 1950 - I had heard a lot of good things about D.O.A., but, unfortunately, found its story's premise to be way too haywire and implausible for me to take it at all seriously. Instead of being exciting, I found D.O.A.'s frantic pace to be actually quite annoying.

As well, this film contained a lot of over-acting by its principal players. There seemed to be so much over-the-top scenery chewing taking place, especially by Edmond O'Brien, as Frank Bigelow, that I began to view this gravely solemn Crime/Drama as something of a cartoon-style comedy.

There were a number of times when I actually burst out laughing when the situation was clearly meant to be taken with the utmost solemn seriousness.

Told in a series of continual flashbacks, D.O.A.'s story concerns Frank Bigelow, a small-town accountant, who, after living-it-up in San Francisco one weekend, finds out that he has been poisoned by a "luminous toxin" (which had been, unknowingly, poured into his drink).

With there being no antidote, Bigelow is told by the doctor that he has, at the most, a week to live. (It is never explained why this poison didn't make him violently ill)

Not knowing who did this to him or why, Bigelow embarks on a desperate journey to try to find out the identity of his murderer.

Directed by Rudolph Mate', D.O.A., filmed in b&w, had a running time of only 83 minutes.

This is not a good movie. I'm the guy who has to ask "what happened?!" when he walks out of the theater. But I have to think the great majority of viewers will have a rough time figuring out just what's going on.

And the romantic subplot is SO mawkish and unrealistic. Did anybody buy this kind of dialog in 1949? It seems hard to imagine now.

The acting is routine and mundane; some of it is almost laughably bad.

But there are redeeming features. I liked the sleazy sexuality of ordinary people that reminds us that sex was indeed invented before 1963. I loved the street scenes of San Francisco of that period. Maybe it's a generational thing, but it seems to me that, if 1979 and 1999 occurred on difference planets, then 1949 and 1969 happened in different solar systems. It seems like such another world.