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D.O.A.

A man walks into a police station to report his own murder. Rudolph Maté’s 1949 film noir — one of the leanest and most famous in the genre — follows accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) after a nightcap in San Francisco leaves him dying of iridium poison, with only hours to learn who slipped it to him and why. Flashbacks, jazz clubs, a mysterious bill of sale, and a chase that runs from the desert to L.A. keep the clock screaming. Maté, the great German-born cinematographer of The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, directing in America, shoots sunlight like a threat. O’Brien sweats through every reel. A public-domain cornerstone of noir: you’re dead on arrival, and the movie still has to happen.

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