D.O.A. Review

The classic San Francisco-set Rudolph Maté original in which vacationing small-town insurance man Frank Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien) awakes from a bourbon binge with a poison-laced hangover and two days to live. In his desperate search to find his “murderer” he slaps women he’d normally seduce and threatens others with a gun he’d usually not know how to load. This latecomer to the film noir(two ital) canon has the archetypal mix of hostile strangers, and an innocent alone, flavoured by an unusual mix of locations and broad daylight — neither of which diminish its menace or tension.