D.O.A.

Frank Bigelow: I want to report a murder.
Detective: Where was this murder committed?
Frank Bigelow: San Francisco, last night.
Detective: Who was murdered?
Frank Bigelow: I was.

So begins Rudolf Mate's classic film noir. Edmond O'Brien plays a traveling businessman who gets poisoned for knowing something that he didn't know he knew. It may sound confusing, but it all makes sense in the black and white world of film noir. The poison is slow -- taking a few days to finish off its victim, and there is no cure. O'Brien then becomes a man with nothing left to lose, because, after all, he's already dead -- a walking murder victim. He's not afraid to talk to villains in ways that they are not used to being talked to, because he's going to die anyway. This is a fine film marred by Dimitri Tiomkin's score which plays an annoying note everytime he notices an attractive girl -- the kind of sound that cartoons had the integrity to avoid. Mate' was a lesser known director, but a master cinematographer who worked with Carl Dreyer on some of his finest films, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. He didn't shoot this film, but shows that he was a competent director, but probably little more.