The phenomenon of the amateur sleuth reaches an ironic pinnacle in D.O.A., in which a hapless accountant, Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien, ever fate's imperfect foil), has only a few days in which to solve a case of murder-his own. Gone is the cinema of reasoned, witty crime detection (and civilized criminals); in D.O.A.'s doomed universe the joke is on Bigelow, detective and victim. Escaping L.A. and the claustrophobia of an impending marriage, in San Francisco Bigelow latches onto the false gaiety of visiting conventioneers and the moody blues of locals of the sunglasses-at-night persuasion. But the whisky sours when someone slips Bigelow a deadly mickey in a waterfront nightclub (the place is a dark apotheosis of jazz-in-film in its sweaty intensity and its sinister consequences). In a life radically condensed, Bigelow searches for the who and the why of his inevitable death-the absurdity of the former, and the anti-climax of the latter, being a fitting (if undeserved) end to his mediocre life. Ace cinematographer-turned-director Rudolph Maté molds the familiar into an hallucinatory nightmare, a vision of streets with no end and an apathy so profound as to be sadistic.