D.O.A.

Working off & on sporadically through the day, I got stubs started on ALB-130 - ALB-140. There were two or three of these DVDs which were not Boobpedia-worthy. They didn't interest me either, but I just started templates for them, to include in the complete series listing when that gets started. Frustratingly enough, my article-making routine is so efficient it took about twice as much time to start a template for a DVD that did not have an article... Searching around the Net, I see that the jaw-droppingly gorgeous cosplayer, LUU, has added new images to her blog. In an email to her fans yesterday, she jokingly complained about the hot weather being rough on chubby people. She hopes winter comes soon. While I give her all my sympathy, and I do like colder weather myself, if this image from her blog is any indication of what she looks like sitting around the swimming pool, I'm sure I join her other fans in hoping the warm spell holds on for a good, long while.

I couldn't wait, and cracked open a new Mill Creek 50-movie box this evening: Dark Crimes. Though I've still got plenty to watch in my other boxes, this newly released box has a film I've heard about and wanted to see for quite a while-- D.O.A. (1949 or 1950-- reports vary)-- and I couldn't resist the temptation. For a change, this one lived up to its reputation. Though it was obviously done on a shoestring budget, it's a very tense, twisted, gripping, sardonic, entertaining little noir. It starts out with a man staggering into the police station to report a murder-- his own murder. He is a dead man. Naturally enough, the rest of the story is told in flashback to lead up to that first scene. It's funny that this kind of thing was considered so "new" and "radical" when Tarantino did it 40 years later in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)... and everyone was saying he must have got that playing with the narrative structure from Asian films-- Hong Kong or Japanese. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Tarantino and Asian films, but, WTF? Look at these old noirs! That's where this comes from... (And they have their own antecedents, of course... German expressionism and U.S. gangster films of the '30s... And Billy Wilder takes this idea one step further in Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which the narrator is already dead at the beginning of the film.)

After the intro, the film starts giving off a deceptively romantic-comedy vibe. The first half of the movie takes place in San Francisco, giving some nice views of the city, including, apparently, scenes shot guerrilla-style, with the main character running into innocent pedestrians on the street. (This brought to mind that stupendous opening of Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり けもの部屋 - Joshuu sasori: Kemono-beya; (1973) when Meiko Kaji goes running through a busy downtown street with a policeman's severed arm handcuffed to hers and flopping around behind her. The looks she gets from passing pedestrians are priceless.) The only sour note was towards the beginning. Whenever the main character looks at an attractive woman, you hear a slide whistle on the soundtrack go "WOO WOO!" like a wolf whistle. I mean, all of us guys walk around with one of those whistles going off in our heads constantly, but here it was just a bit too much. Dmitri Tiomkin did the soundtrack, but I doubt he would have done that though... don't know who's to blame. Speaking of the soundtrack, though it was obviously post-synced, there is a terrific little jazz combo featured in these early scenes in San Francisco which helps make the lighter scenes pass more enjoyably. After getting fooled into thinking this would be a mildly enjoyable, ignorable screwball-noir, it really pulls you into the story. The darker half of the film takes place in L.A., giving a minor tour of some of the seedier areas of that city. Among many good supporting players, Neville Brand makes an especially despicable, sadistic thug-- I was sitting there, squirming, thinking I'd like to beat the living shit out of the bastard myself. Now that's the sign of a good villain... Irony and fatalism are typical tools in noir, but in this one they are cranked up a couple notches. I am sure this is one that will reward multiple viewings... IMDb says it was entered into the National Film Registry in 2004. And it gets a whopping Eight stars out of Ten from me. Here, watch it for yourself at the Internet Archive.