D.O.A (1950)

The beginning of D.O.A. (dir. Rudolph Maté) could hardly be any gloomier. A guy shows up at a police station and tells the puzzled officer that he has been murdered. The story that ensues shows the circumstances that lead up to this strange statement. The main character Frank is a drab accountant who ends up in trouble because of some innocent-looking papers. He goes on a vacation and during that vacation, his life - shared with a doting almost-wife - turns into hell. He gets involved in a big network of criminals and all the time he has this look on his face: what did I do to deserve this? D.O.A. takes a familiar theme and stretches it even further into the darkness: the innocent guy is entangled in a mess of circumstances over which he has no control. He acts, but his actions are all doomed. In D.O.A. the main character is literally a walking dead. Death is only a sort of logical conclusion, a conclusion we do not even need to see. What we see is instead Frank's frantic attempts to get clear about the source of the trouble he has ended up in. The trail leads from one person to the next but we all know that this has absolutely no consequence for Frank's own fate - impending death. Every bit of the story is entirely moronic. Nonetheless, it is easy to make sense of the innocent slip of paper that suddenly is seen under the description of lethal evidence. Unblinkingly, I accept Frank's inexplicable transformation from everyman to frenzied & tormented investigator who rushes from one city to another to trail the bad guys. Because all the time, the nonsensical events are accompanied by an acute sense of both resolution (for what we do not know) and doom. The cinematography perfectly captures this stupid, but brilliant, plot. Delirious images (a claustrophobic home/surreal socializing/sweaty nightclub/burning sun/crowded streets/seedy hotel rooms) for a delirious movie.