Edmond O'Brien

D.O.A.

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Frank with gun in hand

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

The Hitch-Hiker

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L-R: Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, Edmond O'Brien

1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with an on-screen declaration: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” A gun, a man, a car, those staccato sentences, the threat of death – it’s film noir, and an unusual one not because of its length (a lot of noirs were short B movies), but because it was directed by Ida Lupino, a rare female voice in among the big swinging dicks of … Read more