“A picture as excitingly different as its title” is the tag line for United Artists’ D.O.A., short for “dead on arrival.” Shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, D.O.A. tells the story of an insurance salesman, Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien in one of his best roles ever), who goes to a sales convention in San Francisco, before settling down with his secretary, Paula Gibson (played by Pamela Britton).

Frank is on the make for women in San Francisco’s jazz clubs, and at one of them, he is slipped a deadly drink containing a luminous poison because, we later find out, he notarized a document for an illegal uranium sale, and if the nature of the sale is exposed, it will have dire consequences for the killer.

The film begins with Bigelow walking into a Los Angeles police station to report a murder—his own—and tell how he gunned down Halliday, the man who slipped him the poison (William Ching). The rest of the film is told in flashback, and at the end we see Bigelow Falls dead and is tagged D.O.A. by the police.

O’Brien gives on of his best performances as the everyman, the antihero who finds the man who murdered him before time runs out. D.O.A was made by German expatriate Rudolph Maté in the Expressionist noir tradition of starting a film with its protagonist already dead (or nearly so)—like two of Billy Wilder’s films, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Double Indemnity (1944)—and narrating past events. However, Bigelow is not

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