D.O.A.

The opening scene of D.O.A. is so punchy and dramatic that it has to be up there on any best-ever list. A man walks into a police station, finds the homicide department and announces that there’s been a murder. “Who was murdered,” asks the homicide captain. “I was,” Frank Bigelow replies. The film ends on a humdinger, too, which in the circumstances is almost unnecessarily generous. In between, in flashback, we get the back story to that odd opening remark, one that doesn’t seem to have surprised the cops at all. Fate often deals bad cards to the leading characters in film noir. It’s particularly undeserved here, a tale of a small guy … Read more