D.O.A. Lives Down to Its Title

D.O.A. (1950)

Directed by Rudolph Maté

United Artists, 83 minutes, Not rated.

★

 

What would you do if you felt great but found out you had one week to live? That’s an intriguing question, but I’d recommend not wasting your time watching D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival). This film is often considered a classic film noir and has been preserved in the National Film Registry, but if Elon Musk wants to find cut government waste, getting rid of every extant copy of this turkey-posing-as-a-peacock would be a good place to start. That might prove beyond Musk’s mental bandwidth, though. Because of a filing error, United Artists never registered a copyright of this film, hence it was fair game to remake it four times under different titles (1969, 1988, 2017, 2022). If you’ve never heard of any of them (especially the 1950 original), consider yourself lucky.

 

D.O.A. has a decent opening, but little else. Accountant/notary Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) walks into a San Francisco precinct to report a murder­–of himself. Good hook, but there was no bait on the barb. We flash back a few days. In good 1950s fashion, all of the single women in Frank’s office would like to step out with him, though he treats them all like pieces of meat to be courted or ignored as he pleases. That includes Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton), his favorite babe to exploit. She’s just nuts about Frank, which on the grander scale makes her just plain nuts.

 

Despite his exciting job as an accountant, Frank is bored with his work, his relationships, and life in Banning, California. He decides to take a vacation to San Francisco, allegedly to recharge his batteries but actually to play the field in an  unfamiliar park. He arrives at his hotel the night that a convention has closed and they partying hardy doing silly dances in their business suits and dresses and drinking themselves into stupors. Frank begs off of an invention to join them, changes his mind, and circulates throughout the suite feigning interest in boring men in boring jobs whilst ogling the ladies. In case you don’t get that, sound track wolf whistles alert you that Frank’s major interest is luring a girl gone wild into his bed. Franks scores, but not the way he hoped. We see a shadowy figure exchange his drink for another, which we suspect is not a good thing.

 

Guess what? We’re correct! Franks wakes up and feels so terrible that he visits a doctor. The doc thinks Frank is as fit as Mr. Universe but is asked to wait until his tests come back. You know that today’s medical system stinks because it takes just seconds for the results to come back. A grim-faced doctor tells him he has iridium poisoning and has days, maybe a week, to live. A nearby hospital likewise takes him in immediately—that’s how we know it’s a movie—and confirms his death sentence. So how does Frank spend his time? By not telling Paula about it and flying to Los Angeles to find the person who poisoned him.

 

A contrived backstory has it that Eugene Phillips (or is it Philips?) has been trying to contact Frank. He arrives in LA to encounter Eugene’s widow (Lynne Baggett), Philips’ company comptroller, Eugene’s brother Stanley (Henry Hart), and a cockamamie story that Eugene killed himself by jumping out a window. It will stagger you to learn that this isn’t on the level and that a gangster (Luther Adler) who might be Majak or Rakubian is involved—Holy Cold War, Batman! There’s also a femme fatale named Marla (Laurette Luez). Frank is threatened but, I mean, whadda they gonna do, kill him? Majak probably stole the iridium but let’s just say that his motives for killing an accountant aren’t terribly compelling. Would you be shocked if I told you that infidelity was a factor? Or that that Eugene died by a means other than suicide, or that… oh, who cares? The only warm fuzzy is that Frank realizes he’s deeply in love with Paula and regrets he treated her so badly. Death bed confession? Sheesh! Some guys will do anything to avoid commitment.  

 

What a dopey movie. Director Rudolph Maté was a respected Hungarian cinematographer who worked with legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer before switching chairs. You probably wouldn’t recognize most of Maté’s films. Unless you’re a film geek, there’s no need to correct that.

 

Rob Weir

 

Native Idenity, Boarding Schools, and Historical Damage

 

 

 

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

To be published April 22, 2025

By Mary Annette Pember

Penguin Random House, 304 pages.

★★★

 

Native Americans have been called America’s “forgotten minority.” Discussions of discrimination and racism often focus on other groups, yet if one looks at negative social data (poverty, poor housing, substance abuse, poor health, infant death, unemployment, etc.) indigenous Americans are at the bottom of most of them. Mary Annette Pember, an Ojibwe*, argues this is by design, not an unfortunate twist of history.

 

Many books have been written about white land grabs, Indian wars, and broken treaties, but Pember cuts to the quick by noting that indigenous history is where the Great Commission–the command for Christians to evangelize the globe–meets the Great Chain of Being, a biological taxonomy that ranks living things from simple to complex. At the height of the eugenics movement, the latter view extended the rankings to humankind. The eugenics movement merely reiterated older ideals. When the U.S. Constitution was approved, enslaved Africans were counted as 3/5^th of a person; Indians were not counted at all.

 

Pember’s book is at once a sweeping historical account, a family history, and a personal memoir. There is an extensive historiography of Native American history, but Pember adds detail to the lesser discussed tale of Indian boarding schools, a topic that often goes no deeper than mentions of the Carlisle Indian School to give context for the prowess of famed athlete Jim Thorpe during the early 20^th century. Pember notes that by the 1920s, a startling 76 percent of Indian children were sent to boarding schools.  “Sent” is the operative word, as many of them were judicial and legislative kidnappings undertaken to “assimilate” indigenous children into mainstream society. That meant  bans of native languages, dress, customs, and rituals.

 

This is a personal issue for Pember, whose mother Bernice attended St. Mary’s Catholic Indian School in Odanah, Wisconsin, to the chagrin of her mother Cece, an early Ojibwe activist. In many ways Bernice bought into assimilation; she adopted a prim image as if to prove wrong a nun who called Indians “dirty.” Pember, however, presents boarding schools in a Dickensian light, institutions marked by body-numbing hard work, food deprivation, authoritarian regimentation, and corporal punishment. Her descriptions call to mind Irish laundries for unwed mothers, and the treatment of Māori in New Zealand and Aborigines in Australia. To cite just one impact of poor conditions, in 1925, 87 out every 100,000 individuals in the United States contracted TB; among indigenous peoples the level was nearly seven times higher.

 

What Bernice missed–as did Pember in her youth–was deep immersion in Ojibwe language and culture. The band to which Pember belongs lives in northern Wisconsin along the shores of Lake Superior. Much of their land and that of some Sioux and Ho–Chunk was grafted away by lumber interests in 1837,  but roughly 125,000 acres plus the right to conduct rituals on Madeline Island were guaranteed by an 1854 treaty. It is today land belonging to the Medicine River reservation**.

 

Pember traces a legacy of harm and cultural damage done by boarding schools. It is a powerful story, though it must be said that the book occasionally stumbles by trying to do too much. Particularly noticeable are its tonal shifts. Pember is didactic when reviewing history, personal in discussing her family saga, and righteously angry at some of her own experiences. Because she often crams history and memoir into the same chapters, it is easy to get lost chronologically and thematically. Chapter 2, for instance, begins with an incident in Bernice’s life, jumps back to Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) and wends its way forward, cuts away to Ojibwe culture, and returns to Bernice. Most of the material on boarding schools is found in chapters 5-8 of the book’s 10 chapters and even then, Pember shifts between broader and personal history.  Although it was published before Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) became President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous History of the United States (2014) is an easier read for anyone looking for a survey of Native American history. Then again, Dunbar-Ortiz devotes but six pages to boarding schools.

 

I recommend Medicine River, but take your time.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

*Ojibwe references an Algonquian dialect. Tribal members are properly called Anishinaabe, meaning “True People,” though many whites called them Chippewa.

 

** In a telltale etymological shift, white French traders called the stream emptying into Lake Superior, “Bad River.”