D. O. A. - 1950

This movie is one of those classics I'd seen before, but I wanted to watch it again so I could review it.

Frank heads off to San Francisco for a week vacation. His clingy girlfriend isn't happy about it, so she keeps calling throughout the film. Across the hall from his hotel room, a party is going on. He's invited, and the group ends up at a club where Frank is poisoned.

The next day, he doesn't feel well and heads to a doctor. (Can you imagine just walking into a doctor's office and being seen? They'd laugh you out the door nowadays!) He seems fine until the tests come back that he has "luminous poisoning." 

From here on, Frank wants to know why someone in a strange city wanted to murder him before it's too late. He makes a lot of wrong guesses, but gets there eventually.

I found a few things interesting/amusing with this movie. First, the intro tells you that he makes it to the police station after his adventure, so any future scrapes he gets into, you know he makes it out of. It removes the tension from the situations. And then, at the beginning, the cop asks Frank to tell the story in his own way, and that's when we watch the movie. Some parts make me grin. Is he describing this meaningless argument with Paula? Is he going into detail about the touching scene on the sidewalk before he leaves? Weird. It was also a good thing he had perfect timing. It was one of those deaths that come right after you've said your piece. "And that's why I died." If he hadn't timed it correctly, he might've died while telling the story of one of the less important moments.

Anyway, joking aside, it was an okay film. I understand the shock factor with the beginning. "I've been murdered" isn't something most people walk into a police station and say. But by starting the film that way, they sacrificed a lot of suspense later on. I guess the "luminous toxin" was a descriptive term used for an actual poison (according to the end note). I tried to do a bit of digging on it, but I couldn't find anything conclusive.

It was an okay movie. Paula was irritating, and Frank was way over the top with his accusations and wrong guesses. He was a putz to most of the people he met, and while you could make excuses for why, it didn't exactly endear his character to me. And you knew he was going to die at the end, so there was no point hoping for a happy ending.