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cannot be distinguished from them. In -fact, one's sympathies are almost reversed as Bigelow becomes the bully, hounding people who only wish to be left alone. * The noir world is a state of nature. The police, the physical embodiment of the law, to whom Bigelow is telling the story in retrospect, are useless. It is Bigelow who discovers the crime, solves it and metes out justice. If, in the romantic view, the noir crusader is a knight-errant, he is also a fascist with no more respect for the law than those he opposes. Mike Hammer's success in Kiss Me Deadly is due largely to the fact that he plays the villains' game better than they do. The seemingly diverse strands of D. O.A. cohere in the person of its hero. It is Bigelow who brings together the connection between Majak and Halliday, how Halliday conned his partner Phillips into buying the stolen iridium so that it would be "clean" when it was resold. It is in Bigelow's mind, literally, that the whole story exists, for no one else knows it. Others can see part, but even those who have created the dilemma cannot see his part, while after they have played theirs he can see not only the inspiration at the beginning and the machinations in the middle, but also the end he will write. When Phillips takes the blame for stealing the iridium, Bigelow is the only one who can clear him because he has a record of the bill of sale, which he notarized, that will show whom Phillips bought it from. This is the reason Bigelow is poisoned. Halliday realizes Bigelow can prove to be his undoing and poisons him even though Bigelow cannot even recall the transaction. The implied irony is that if they had not killed him he would never have become involved and the crime would have gone undetected. As it is, Bigelow becomes-as the New York Times put it when the picture opened-"caught up in a web of circumstance that marks him for death." Once, Bigelow regrets his decision to hunt his murderers. There is a strange scene after Majak's hoods capture Bigelow in his hotel room. The phone rings. It is Pamela calling from the office. She is worried because he has not talked to her recently. In . fact, he has not told her of his imminent demise and has been very short with her in their previous conversations. While the two hoods flank him-one (Neville Brand) holding a gun to his head, the other the receiver to his ear-he talks to her, softly, as if the others weren't present. This would almost seem to be * D.O.A. does not predate the current yield of vigilante films so much as form part of the tradition, which reaches back to the frontier where a man was his own law. the case, for director Rudolph Mat~ holds the shot and the men remain in the same positions, completely stationary, as if they were statuary or had found themselves in front of the camera when they shouldn't be. After a while one forgets them and concentrates instead on Bigelow. What comes across is a scene of intimacy between lovers rather than one of danger. And the intimacy is genuine, for Bigelow tells her he loves and misses her, talking without interruption longer than would seem safe from the criminals' point of view, risking discovery as a consequence. That the shot of the three of them, held in medium closeup, is played for longer than it can be sustained does not detract from the film's strength but rather is part of it, contributing to the sense of general dislocation. Pamela Britton is protected from this seaminess by virtue of being a woman. As such, she is not only dependent on Bigelow but subordinate to him. Bigelow originally leaves her so that he can be alone and decide if he wants to marry her, if this is really it. She, of course, is sure. If the two of them marry she knows it will be something "wonderful." Here marriage is an ideal to aspire to, a creative union that serves as a substitute to any real artistic inclinations in the middle class. But Bigelow is not sure that it's right, and tells her that he's seen what can happen when two people begin to hate each other. It's always the woman who gets hurt worse, he assures her. The form of his meditation on matrimony is a last fling. He goes to San Francisco, where he knows no one, and eventually arrives at a bar, The Fisherman, where life is uninhibited-as opposed to the restricted existence he has been leading. Bigelow is in the process of picking up some woman' when he .is poisoned by a mysterious stranger who switches drinks on him. He is, in effect, punished for both his disloyalty to Pamela Britton and his interest in casual sex as opposed to marriage. t In fact the music from the bar is played again over the soundtrack when Bigelow corners Halliday and guns him down, to remind the audience of the true source of Bigelow's affliction. * Women in film noir are never seen to be active without the aid of a man. Often they are not active at all, like Britton. This is not to say that she is of no help to Bigelow in her own right; in fact, she is the t It is the opposite of the principle in Hitchcock's films where the woman is punished for her boldness and must go through some ordeal in order to be purified (viz. 'Tippi' Hedren in The Birds and Mamie, and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious .) * For this observation I am indebted to Gail Petersen.
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