D.O.A. (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1949)
D.O.A. (dir. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1988)
A man, shot from behind, walks into a police station. We follow him as he goes through the building, turning into the Homicide Division offices. He approaches a pair of detectives and declares, “I want to report a murder.”
The lead detective asks him to sit down.
“Where was this murder committed?” he asks.
“San Francisco, last night” the faceless man replies.
“Who was murdered?”
We cut, face forward, onto a haggard and resigned Edmund O’Brien.
“I was.”
It is a stunning opening to a film, and the story that O’Brien’s dying accountant Frank Bigelow tells the police—involving a jazz club, a poisoning, stolen iridium, and a shooting at the Bradbury Building—largely lives up to that audacious sequence and high concept set-up of a man investigating his own imminent death.
And due to a mistake, D.O.A. is in the public domain, meaning you can watch all eighty minutes of it right now just about anywhere online. It also means that it was very easy to mount remakes of the film. Most only use the premise, but the British husband-and-wife team of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel made their own version of D.O.A. in 1988 that is, well, not the original, but still pretty fun.
The opening sequence is virtually identically to the 1949 version, replicating camera shots and the monochrome cinematography, but adding Christmas decor around the police station and a musical score that really doesn’t work, but was composed by Jankel’s sister, which apparently means you have to use it.
The protagonist of this film is Dexter Cornell (Dennis Quaid), a professor of literature and novelist who hasn’t published a book in several years. He begins his story in full color. It is the last day of class, which, because this is a film, in no way resembles anything that has ever happened on the university level. Instead of administering an exam or reminding his students that final essays are due, he asks them about the use of color in literature. This is done solely to introduce two notable characters: aspiring writer Nick Lang (Robert Knepper) and first year student and fan Sydney Fuller (Meg Ryan). After class is dismissed, Cornell rebuffs Lang, who wants an opinion on the novel he has written. We then meet Cornell’s fellow faculty member, Hal Petersham (Daniel Stern), shortly before the apparent suicide of Lang, who has leapt from the English faculty building. Cornell’s day becomes worse as his estranged wife Gail (Jane Kaczmerack) presents divorce papers to him. He wraps up the night by getting shithammered in a bar before waking up from a blackout in Sydney’s dormitory. Don’t worry, they haven’t had sex–not yet anyway. Cornell, who knows what a hangover should feel like, thinks he might have the flu. He goes to the hospital and learns that he’s been poisoned and has only 36 hours left to live.
The rest of the film follows Cornell as he tries to find out who has poisoned him and why. While this concept was a little contrived even in the original 1949 version, this is the neo-noir take on the story, which means that it knows just how ridiculous this all is: “Nobody plots to kill an English professor, we just don’t inspire that kind of passion.” Characters share names with pulp writers and noir directors. The over-the-top nature of the story is exemplified by the presence of Charlotte Rampling as a wealthy English patroness and Christopher Neame as her sinister chauffeur, who both belong in an entirely different sort of plot than this. Not only that, but the color of the film slowly drains out of the picture, signifying Cornell’s approaching death. It’s a neat little effect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t silly, just like Cornell supergluing himself to Sydney to coerce her into helping him or an elaborate chase involving a nail gun.
Morton and Jankel had risen to fame as co-creators of Max Headroom in 1985 before being given the go-ahead to direct D.O.A. While the film was neither a commercial or critical success and remains a curiosity at best, the pair would still get another chance to helm a big budget Hollywood adaptation of a well-known property. Some of you know where this is going, but for those of you who do not, I will give a hint: it features notable non-Italians Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as brothers who go up against a crooked real estate developer played by Dennis Hopper in a Blade Runner inspired dystopia that only vaguely resembles its video game origins.
Like D.O.A., that also isn’t a good film, but I still enjoy it. Kind of.
oliveresque 