Our Film of the Week had to be a classic of film noir, didn’t it? After all, our word is darkness, and we’ve got a whole genre of movies that are filled with it. Or are they? The old Twilight Zone series was full of noir episodes and sequences that focused on the seamy side of life: the derelict who assumes the identity of a murdered gangster when he takes the shoes from the body and puts them on; the fat huckster with a heart of stone, who sells “magic dust” to an old man pleading with the people of an old western village not to hang his son, who intended no crime; the selfish and cowardly astronaut who murders his fellow crewmen over water, when they land on a dry and dead planet, only to find out shortly that the place is Nevada — and I could go on. The thing was, though, that such episodes, which had to be filmed in black and white, did not violate or even question the moral order. We might say that Rod Serling, the creator of the series, was acquainted with the night, but by no means in love with it. And so it is that most of the greatest of noir films affirm what is right and good and true by reaction against their violation. That doesn’t make them easy-going morality tales, because it often requires considerable courage to examine the dark tunnels and crevices in that most labyrinthine of caves, the human heart. A film like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity may grip us with the startling power of an evil will, embodied in Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale, but the final scene is of the man she embroiled in murder, dying, with no hope, smoking one last cigarette, given to him by his boss, to whom he has confessed everything. You can no more smash through that moral order than a butterfly can batter down an iron wall.

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Today’s film, D. O. A., that is, Dead On Arrival, has the most ironic title of any film I know. For it does not describe a man fatally shot, who dies before the police can get him to a hospital. It describes a man who is simultaneously the victim of murder, the detective who solves his own murder, and the witness to the police of that murder and the tangled web of evil that instigated it. I’m not giving up any spoilers here when I say that the film begins with the victim revealing everything, in flashback, to the police: he goes to the police station himself, to report a murder — his own. Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien, one of our favorites here at Word and Song) is an accountant and notary public, unmarried, with a secretary who is in love with him, though he doesn’t exactly return the love. He takes a jaunt to San Francisco for a couple of nights out on the town, and at a nightclub with a group of loud conventioneers, somebody slips something into his drink. He wakes up the next morning feeling miserable, and it’s not a hangover. The doctor he sees tells him that it is “luminous toxin,” for which there is no antidote. In case you’re wondering, the makers of the film assure the audience that there really is such a thing, and that they have done due medical diligence; perhaps it is white phosphorus, extremely toxic, though it may take you several days to die of it, and if you ingest more than a little of it, you have no hope. So Bigelow is alive and knows he has been murdered, but he does not know who did it, or why, or even if he was the intended victim. He decides to spend his last hours on earth solving the crime, though his condition is deteriorating and he is often in intense pain.

Many noirs involve relatively innocent people who become enmeshed in crime: think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, in which an ordinary workman at a munitions plant is targeted by both the police and the pro-Nazi traitors — obviously, for different reasons. The police think he is responsible for blowing up the plant; the traitors, who want to frame him, know he is not, but they do not want him on the loose, either, because he might well solve the crime. That’s the case with D. O. A. Bigelow has nothing to do with the underworld — in this film, peopled with such stalwarts of film noir as the character-actor Luther Adler, the brains of the operation, and Neville Brand, here playing a cheerfully sadistic thug. It is also the breakout film for Beverly Garland (her married name then was Campbell, and so it appears in the credits), whom you may remember as Fred MacMurray’s late-in-life wife in the final seasons of My Three Sons. Here she’s Bigelow’s underappreciated secretary. From what I’ve seen, she never got the recognition she deserved.

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I’ve said that Bigelow is an ordinary man, and that’s true, but he is not an innocent. That is, we are led to make some rather mild but also definite judgments as to his moral character. He seems to have been a bit selfish all his life, not deserving of the love that his secretary bears for him, so that his poisoning is in part also a transformation, not into a very good man, but into a man with a real purpose. And sometimes things do happen that way, don’t they? Once, when I was visiting a maximum security prison in Massachusetts, I met an old lifer, Rocco, who was part of a group of third-order Dominicans there; the men had given themselves up to the service of God only after their incarceration. Rocco told me that being sent up for life was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that he never knew freedom until then. We might say at least of Bigelow that he only became a real man when he knew he was going to die.

By the way, the director, Rudolph Maté, was renowned first and for most of his career as a cinematographer, nominated for an Oscar in that category for five consecutive years. The first of those was for Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Foreign Correspondent, and does that film have some unforgettable visual scenes, involving a windmill, the observation deck at St. Paul’s, and an airplane downed in the ocean! D. O. A. doesn’t take us across the seas, but when the director is a cinematographer, you should expect the shots to be intense, and that’s what we’ve got. They serve very well the considerable talents of Edmond O’Brien, one of the less-remembered greats.

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