D.O.A. (1949)

D.O.A. is a 1949 film noir directed by Rudolph Maté and starring Edmond O'Brien. The film opens with its protagonist walking into a police station to report a murder — his own.

Frank Bigelow, a notary public from Banning, California, travels to San Francisco for a holiday. During a night out at a jazz club, he is slipped a slow-acting radioactive poison without his knowledge. When a doctor tells him the toxin is irreversible and fatal, Frank has only days to live — and resolves to spend them finding out who poisoned him and why.

Watch

Video source: Internet Archive — D.O.A.1950 · Public domain

Chapters

Click any timestamp to jump to that point in the film.

1. 00:00 D.O.A. is a 1949 film noir directed by Rudolph Maté and starring Edmond O'Brien. The film opens with its protagonist walking into a police station to report a murder — his own.
2. 03:00 Frank Bigelow (O'Brien), a notary from Banning, California, arrives in San Francisco for a holiday. During a night out at a jazz club, he is slipped a slow-acting radioactive poison — luminous toxin — without his knowledge.
3. 12:00 A doctor informs Frank that the poison is irreversible; he has only days to live. Frank resolves to use his remaining time to discover who poisoned him and why, becoming simultaneously victim and detective.
4. 25:00 Frank's investigation leads him through the criminal underworld of San Francisco and Los Angeles, uncovering a web of fraud involving iridium shipments, forged documents, and several murders he had unknowingly notarised.
5. 45:00 Frank tracks down the killer and shoots him, collapsing immediately afterwards from the poison. He returns to the police station to complete his report — delivered in flashback, the entire film has been his dying statement.
6. 55:00 The police stamp Frank's case file "D.O.A." — Dead on Arrival. The bleak, fatalistic structure of the film, in which the protagonist cannot escape death no matter what he does, has made it one of the defining works of the film noir cycle.

Copyright status

D.O.A. was released in 1949. The film's copyright was not renewed at the required 28-year mark, causing it to enter the public domain. Under United States copyright law, films published before 1964 whose copyrights were not renewed are in the public domain. This film may be freely watched, downloaded, copied, modified, and redistributed without restriction or payment.

References

1. Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward, eds. (1992). Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Overlook Press.
2. Naremore, James (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press.
3. Biesen, Sheri Chinen (2005). Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Johns Hopkins University Press.
4. Internet Archive. “D.O.A. (1949)”. archive.org/details/D.O.A.1950.