edmond o’brien

D.O.A. (1949)

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D.O.A. is a tight little noir thriller (#89 in Douglas Brode’s list in Edge of Your Seat, for those of you playing along at home) that’s one of the most perfect encapsulations of the genre. At 82 minutes, there’s almost no fat to be trimmed, and since it lapsed into the public domain years ago because of failure to renew the copyright, it’s accessible pretty much anywhere. Director Rudolph Maté, who would go on to helm When Worlds Collide just a year later, had risen through the ranks as a cinematographer, having earned his stripes on films as varied and well-remembered as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Foreign Correspondent, and the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda from director Charles Vidor. That eye for composition is striking in the film’s opening sequence, a minutes-long tracking shot that follows a man through a vast and echoey police station to find a particular detective so that he can report a murder: his own. 

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is an accountant and notary public in the desert town of Banning, California, population about seven thousand at the time. His secretary, Paula (Pamela Britton) is madly in love with him, a situation that he seems disinterested in either quashing or pursuing. He springs the news to her that he’s taking a solo weekend trip to San Francisco, much to her disappointment, but there’s nothing she can do to stop him, and away he goes. Arriving at his lodgings, he discovers that the place is full of salesmen who have just wrapped up an annual conference and are holding various parties all over the hotel. The place is lousy with pretty ladies in expensive fur coats, and Frank seems more than ready to sow some oats hither and yon, but not before he returns Paula’s messages. She’s not pleased to hear all the caterwauling in the background, but she nevertheless dutifully reports that a man named Eugene Philips, an importer-exporter, had been desperately trying to reach him all afternoon, ending with the cryptic statement that if he didn’t talk to Frank right away “it would be too late.” Frank goes out with the salesmen from the room across the hall to a jazz bar, where the host’s wife starts to get a little too handsy, and he excuses himself to make small talk with a pretty blonde at the bar. Distracted, he doesn’t notice the lurking figure with his back to the camera surreptitiously slipping something into his drink. The next morning, he feels extremely ill and gets a terminal diagnosis; he’s ingested the “luminous toxin,” a poison with no antidote, and now he has only days left to live, not much time to find out who his killer is.

There’s a lot that happens in the first act of this one, which is great, since it means that the second and third acts move at a breakneck speed as Frank works to pull at all of the threads of a decently convoluted conspiracy and solve his own murder before he drops dead. Paula is a fascinating character, as she initially comes off as slightly off-putting, pestering Frank to the point of workplace sexual harassment. She insists that he take her out for a drink and is notably upset that Frank made plans for a weekend trip that didn’t include her, but she also seems to realize that this is Frank taking an opportunity to give himself one last weekend as a swinging bachelor before settling into a life with her in Banning. Upon awakening in San Francisco on Saturday morning, he’s clearly ready to go back and marry Paula, even before he learns that he’s dying. Once he tells her that he needs her, she shows up to act as his sidekick for the rest of the film, and there’s real affection there. The great tragedy may be that if she hadn’t been suffocating him so, he might not have felt the need to spend a weekend away from her, and then he wouldn’t have been poisoned. Alas. Not that it would have helped save Eugene Phillips, who was going to “commit suicide” that Friday night one way or another. 

One of the other great tragedies in this has a major noir bent, which is the trope of the innocent man caught up in a dangerous web of lies and crime. For Frank, it comes down to a particular bill of sale that he notarized for Phillips months in the past, one that would have proved the dead man’s innocence. It’s not really spoiling much; the film’s electric energy all revolves around Frank going from place to place and getting answers that lead to more questions, all leading back to Phillips’s untimely demise. Who’s the real villain here? Is it Phillips’s brother, who was carrying on an affair with his sister-in-law? Is it Halliday, Eugene’s business partner? Is it the mysterious George Reynolds, whom no one seems to have ever seen and which may be no more than an alias? It’s a tight little mystery that’s completely streamlined. Just as Frank is running out of time, he grows increasingly frantic and desperate to find out who’s responsible for setting his death in motion and ensure that Paula is out of their reach, and the film feels similarly harried and headlong as it rushes toward the conclusion. 

Maté’s is a name that one doesn’t hear bandied about in cinephile circles all that much. It can’t help that, looking at his CV, his filmography is all over the place. There are several films noir listed there, many of which seem intriguing even if I’ve never heard of them, like Union Station starring William Holden, Paula starring Loretta Young, and Forbidden starring Tony Curtis. But in the midst of those are a motley assortment of historical adventures (The Prince Who Was a Thief, The Black Shield of Falworth, and The 300 Spartans), romantic comedies (It Had to Be You, Sally and Saint Anne), Oscar bait (No Sad Songs for Me), and far, far too many Westerns to name. The man worked, and his talent is clear here, and I’m excited to see if I can track down some of his other noir and crime thrillers, even if I have no interest in Siege at Red River, The Far Horizons, or The Rawhide Years. The performances here are great as well, as O’Brien perfectly embodies a man who’s clearly been spending too much time helping farmers file their taxes and fending off Paula’s pawing at him and just needs to know he could still get a city girl’s number, even if he can’t follow through with ringing her up. Britton also walks a narrow tightrope here, needing to play Paula as written while also making her someone we find likable enough to root for her and Frank to get together. With such a short time commitment and widespread availability (it’s even on Tubi), D.O.A. is worth checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Bigamist (1953)

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One of the ways Ida Lupino was able to make the leap from actress to director in the Old Hollywood system was by framing her work as morality tales. That way, she could get away with making the first woman-directed noir The Hitch-Hiker—a throat-hold thriller from start to end—by passing it off as a lesson on the dangers of adultery with just a few throwaway lines of dialogue. Her directorial follow-up to that chilling cult classic is much more enthusiastically committed to exploring adultery as a moralistic theme, as you can tell by its attention-grabbing title: The Bigamist. Oddly, though, The Bigamist takes a much more wishy-washy stance on the dangers of adultery than The Hitch-Hiker, even though it dwells on the act for the entirety of its runtime instead of merely evoking it in a mood-setting prologue. The Bigamist is a morality tale about adultery (through its furthest extreme in polygamy) without ever outright condemning the act as a sin. It’s an engagingly ambiguous film in terms of reading its moral compass even now—more than a half-century after its initial release—but especially so for its time.

Edmond O’Brien stars as a traveling salesman who is racked with guilt because he’s hopelessly in love with both of his wives, who live in two distant cities. Joan Fontaine co-stars as his wife of 8 years, who has settled into a business partner role as the initial romantic spark of their marriage has dulled. Ida Lupino rounds out the cast as the salesman’s wife of 8 months, a fiercely independent West Coast waitress who reignites the salesman’s lust for life. The movie is set up like a murder-mystery noir where the salesman’s discomfort around anyone digging into his personal life is meant to spark the imagination of the audience. What nefarious acts could he possibly be up to on these business trips? The answer, of course, is right there on the poster and in the title: “Edmond O’Brien is The Bigamist.” Once the full details of his double-marriage lifestyle are divulged, the movie mostly dwells on the melodrama of his predicament, focusing especially on the unbearable stress of balancing a double life. The women both get their own moments of spotlight to convey their internal anguish, but this is largely the bigamist’s story, and it’s in daring to sympathize with the lout where the movie finds its moral ambiguity.

In a lot of ways, The Bigamist feels like an inverse of (and a precursor to) Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, in that it takes the husband’s love for both women seriously without poking too harshly at how the women might be working overtime domestically to make his traveling Lothario lifestyle possible. If anything, the film comes across as surprisingly pro-polyamory, since it entirely builds its melodrama on the guilt & harm of the salesman’s dishonesty rather than the usual fallacy that he can’t love both women equally at once. He initially cheats out of loneliness and confesses the transgression to his first wife in plain terms, who takes the admission as a playfully sarcastic joke since he’s just not the type to do such a thing. While most of his colleagues would just hire a sex worker to satisfy that urge, this lout can’t help but fall in love with his mistress, who initially asks that he reveal nothing about his personal life outside their relationship so as not to spoilt the mood. Both of his marriages are relatively functional in their own insular realms; what eats the bigamist up on the inside are the lies necessary to maintain his cross-country rouse. That’s a bold moralistic stance to take in a Hays Code era film where the leads have to sleep in separate beds for the sake of onscreen propriety.

Of the three leads, Ida Lupino is the most electric in her role as the salesman’s second wife. According to Wikipedia, this film has been cited as the first time the female star of a Hollywood film directed her own performance, which is pretty neat but also difficult to verify without several qualifiers. What’s much easier to verify is the strange real-life melodrama that played out behind the scenes between the director and her collaborators. Lupino had recently split with her ex-husband and creative partner Collier Young, who wrote & produced The Bigamist while at the start of a new marriage with Lupino’s co-star, Joan Fontaine. In that way, the film works just as well as a relic of Hollywood gossip as it does as a morally ambiguous noir. It even accentuates that Hollywood rumor mill DNA by setting the first scene of emotional infidelity on a bus tour of famous Los Angeles movie stars’ homes – including the homes of women like Barbara Stanwyck & Jane Wyman, who could have been cast in this just as easily as Fontaine (as well as the home of Miracle on 42nd Street‘s Edmund Gwenn, who does feature heavily in the movie as the nosy adoption agency bureaucrat who initially exposes the salesman’s bigamy). It’s a nice little meta touch for a movie so unavoidably steeped in Studio Era scandal.

Even speaking in general, Ida Lupino’s life & career are inextricably tied to Old Hollywood mystique. It’s incredible that she was able to manage as interesting & high-profile of a directorial career as she did in a system designed to lock women out of that creative process entirely. The Bigamist is not quite as immediately thrilling of example of her getting away with something within that misogynist paradigm as The Hitch-Hiker, but the longer you dwell in its moral ambiguity the more it feels like a one-of-a-kind anomaly. Like all of Lupino’s films (and even the filmmaker herself), it’s a wonder that The Bigamist was allowed to exist in its time at all.

-Brandon Ledet