Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 7

  118th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch

  Cool poster, cool opening, and overall cool premise. That’s how I like my film noirs.

  I always enjoy a movie that manages to hook you up from pretty much the start. Here we have Edmond O’Brien playing a man who walks into a police station and reports his own murder. Then we cut off to a flashback where the whole story is told, and we see how he got there. There’s a lot of intrigue, suspense, twists, and a little poison. The ponderous score by Dimitri Tiomkin heightens every emotion. Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography is equally stunning, though his best work was yet to come (Kiss Me Deadly and Judgement at Nuremberg among…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★ 24

  A man must solve the mystery of his own murder before he dies of it in Rudolph Maté’s ticking time bomb of a noir, “D.O.A.” 

  Maté was one of the great cinematographers of the Hollywood golden age, responsible for iconic visuals in films including: “Gilda,” “Foreign Correspondent,” and “The Lady from Shanghai.” Though, in his own directorial efforts, Maté strangely seems to rely more on idea than image. 

  “D.O.A” arrives on the tail of Maté’s ultra low budget hostage noir, “The Dark Past,” in which a criminal takes an All-American family hostage as he flees from the law. Both “Dark Past” and “D.O.A” have conceits that (also due to lapsed copyright) would come to be more mimicked than the original…

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  Review by JayShmoney ★★★ 1

  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  If I had 24 hours to live I could think of a lot of things I would rather do than go to the police and recount in full detail what I did the previous day. Especially if I already solved my own case. Decent time for a low budget noir though with some great on location shooting

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 12

  1st Rudolph Maté

  Death has a wonderful way of clarifying the mind. Gives a man purpose when you've got a poison making its way through your system, rotting your insides out. Could finally tell someone you love them. Could paint a beautiful painting. Could get your will sorted. Could solve your murder, too. That you turn into a bull in a china shop in the process matters little, you'll be dead in 36 hours. It's a delight to watch O'Brien stagger around pissing people off, especially when it's Neville Brand's obnoxious psycho heavy who wants to shoot him in the belly. He's almost supernaturally lucid, determined to do one big thing before his life conks out, and Chester's morbid obsession…

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★½

  Noir-November Challenge! Movie #20

  I have to say the film has one of the most truly unique twists I have ever seen in a classic film! It hooked me from the get go! Your enjoyment of the film will be greatly enhanced if you go in blind! So avoid reading synopsis, summaries or reviews!

  It is not without its flaws! The character Chester was so annoying and over-the-top in a bad way that it took me out of the film! I'd also like to nominate this film for worst death scene ever! The guy didn't collapse to the floor, he dove to the floor it was just awful!

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★ 7

  Viewed with the COLLAB.

  Edmond O'Brien is neck-breaking being so young, and especially, not as his usual drunken-arse types. He's an unconventional but ultimately fantastic choice for the leading role in a wacky, cutthroat noir. The mad dash from one place to the next just to interrogate the next loopy character is either going to work for you or not. The ulterior premise is great and one of the most intriguing one will find for the noir genre, yet the sequences don't totally deliver - the action nor the high stakes. Maybe the latter suffers because this is a story that backfills the inevitable, and while we are intrigued by the hows, whys, whats, and whos, we still want our lead…

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  Review by mrbalihai ★★★★ 2

  Despite mediocre dialogue and overly melodramatic acting, D.O.A. manages to lift itself above the average noir by employing a rather clever gimmick; a fictionally fatal "luminous toxin" that kicks the plot into high gear by turning Edmond O'Brien into a walking corpse who careens wildly around San Francisco and Los Angeles, trying to uncover the fiendish plot behind his incipient murder.

  The film's best hat-trick is a hilarious scene set in a Nautical-themed Tiki bar in San Francisco called "The Fisherman", that features the very first depiction of Beatnik culture on film, complete with a wailing jive band, Polynesian masks, bartenders wearing Hawaiian leis, and goateed hipsters sporting berets and spouting nonsensically hip lingo. In addition, there's a psychopathic, bug-eyed…

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  Review by Mr. DuLac 🇨🇦 ★★★★ 1

  I want to report a murder.
  -Frank Bigelow

  A clear standout film noir because of it's ahead of it's time concept. We open with Frank Bigelow entering a police station to report a murder... his own murder!

  Our main character doesn't know why, or who did it, but he's been poisoned and has little time left to live. The beauty of the film isn't only that you have a man trying to find his murderer before time runs out, but it's also the character they chose to put in that predicament.

  Frank Bigelow, as played by Edmond O'Brien, lives a mundane life where boredom is usually only interrupted by more boredom. It's not all bad though, but Bigelow doesn't even…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 2

  Pure existential noir. What would you do if you only had days to live? Simple: solve your own murder

  Film noir

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  Review by Gregor Kreyca ★★½ 2

  Despite a strong premise (so good it even got reused for a 1988 Thriller with the same name starring Dennis Quaid) this is not really one of my favorite Noirs. My biggest problem is that the movie is not very well paced. It’s slow at some points (especially the beginning) and hectic at other point.

  There is a lot of exposition and name dropping here and I felt confused and left behind most of the time. I'm not even sure who the man was who got shot at the end. I would also argue that Edmond O’Brien, while he’s a decent actor, is not the most charismatic leading man and the way his part is written and acted, he does…

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  Review by noir1946 ★★★½ 4

  “Go on, doc. What are you trying to tell me?”

  Noir’s my name and noir’s my game, but I’ve never been able to warm up to DOA like I should. I just don’t like Edmond O’Brien. The film’s plot calls for an everyman as the lead, but Eddie’s just too ordinary and uninteresting for me, especially in a leading role. It doesn’t help that second-lead Pamela Britton is even less interesting.

  But the film itself, if I can get beyond Eddie, is terrific. Having a character know he’s been murdered while still alive and track down why and by whom is a quintessential noir plot. Add San Francisco and Los Angeles locations, including LA’s Bradbury Building, seemingly built for noir,…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 9

  Like Detour, DOA is told through the lens of a man's desire to define and control the world through which he moves. Presented in flashback, its story is full of adoring, gorgeous women and cowardly criminals, dominated by a two-fisted hero who cares about justice and his woman more than he does his own life. It is patently absurd, but one could argue that is the point: Frank Bigelow is just another noir patsy, a man whose assumptions of authority and agency fall into dusty, even as he tries to retcon the events surrounding his own, slow death.

  While, in the story he tells the police, Frank has moments of fear about his situation, his main response is manly action:…