MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

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.