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| Images courtesy of VCI Entertainment |
Whenever the moniker of VCI Entertainment comes up, I
instinctively get leery. More or less a
public domain outfit with mostly poor quality transfers and some occasional
once-in-a-blue-moon winners, VCI Entertainment today has inherited the position
previously worn by Fox Lorber DVD which for a short time produced discs that
looked worse than most VHS tape iterations.
Despite the middling image and sound quality and hastily thrown together
extras, fans of the film noir subgenre are likely to clamor around the first in
a series of Film Noir Classics Double Feature with Rudolph Maté’s 1949 murder mystery race-against-time thriller D.O.A. and
William A. Seiter’s 1950 lovers-on-the-run undercover cop whodunit Borderline. Though the picture quality of D.O.A.
leaves much to be desired with frequent shakiness, scratches and a general lack
of sharpness or contrast, both of these movies are indelible additions to a
film noir disciple’s ever growing and expansive libraries.
In the first film of the two, D.O.A. or Dead on
Arrival for short follows accountant and notary Frank Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien)
who after a night out on the town for a drink discovers he’s been poisoned with
no antidote in sight and no sign of the perpetrator. Forced to venture out into San Francisco with
only days left to live, his plight sends him through possible leads including
his secretary pointing towards mercurial and psychotic characters including a murderous
gangster played by Neville Brand.
Eventually it starts to crop up his work as a notary may have something
to do with an effort to purge information of the sale of iridium to criminal
forces and people whom he initially thought were close friends now turning up
as mercenary adversaries. Featuring a
rousing score by the legendary Dimitri Tiomkin and dynamic, luminous and fluid
camerawork by Ernest Lazlo of Kiss Me Deadly and a powerful leading
performance by Edmund O’Brien who convincingly conveys the terror and
desperation felt by Frank Bigelow, D.O.A. despite the less-than-stellar
image quality is a surefire masterpiece of the film noir subgenre.
With the second film Borderline featuring Fred
MacMurray (The Apartment) and Claire Trevor (Dead End and Stagecoach),
we find ourselves in a labyrinthine undercover cop thriller involving a
narcotics smuggling operation commandeered by a violent gangster Pete Ritchie
(Raymond Burr) on the US/Mexican border outside of Los Angeles. Due to the nature of the operation, finding
any leads has proven difficult so Madeleine Haley (Claire Trevor) an LAPD
officer and former OSS operative is tasked with venturing into Mexico undercover
to try and woo her way into Ritchie’s good graces. Unbeknownst to each other, she crosses paths
with a gangster named Johnny Macklin (Fred MacMurray) who is also in fact an
undercover officer. With neither side
aware of each other’s backgrounds, the two pair up believing each other to be
two criminals in cahoots with Pete Ritchie.
All the while, the couple find themselves being pursued by Pete and his
goons across desert terrain and hitchhiking their way across the Mexican
border.
A good crime thriller with shades of noir that ultimately
becomes something of a crowd pleasing cops vs. robbers flick rather than
qualifying completely as film noir, Borderline feels like it was tacked
on to this release with the real treat being D.O.A. But considering the lackluster picture
quality of that film, doing a standalone release of just the former noir might’ve
felt like a cheat so Borderline which has better remastering work but pales
in comparison to D.O.A. has been included. Notable for the filmmakers creating their own
production company to finance the film with producer Milton Bren suggesting his
wife, Academy Award winning actress Claire Trevor, for the lead role, Borderline
is mostly a chase thriller with elements of It Happened One Night running
through it right down to some of the hitchhiking.
Both films included here have additional features focused on
the careers of Edmund O’Brien, director Rudolph Maté, Fred
MacMurray and director William A. Seiter but again they’re rather generic and
impersonal. Not much else is on here
though the Blu-ray comes with a DVD counterpart for those still stuck in the
480p era. D.O.A. is a terrific
and taut masterclass example of the film noir genre while Borderline was
a mostly okay (good, not great) crime thriller and while the disc isn’t
horrible, considering the pedigree of D.O.A. it deserved so much better
than this present disc release. You can’t
go wrong with either film though D.O.A. is the one that will get
frequent rewatching over the years while Borderline is kind of a
one-and-done. VCI Entertainment I’m
still uneasy about but this was a mostly good double-feature release fans of
film noir will want to grab up right away.
--Andrew Kotwicki
