Dead on arrival: The fate of Australian film noir

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reg Goldsworthy brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films, It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1969) and That Lady from Peking (1970). The second of these, Color Me Dead, was a direct (credited) remake of the film noir classic D.O.A. (Maté, 1949). Discarding the flashback structure of the original, Color Me Dead begins with an atmospheric night-sequence, but soon settles into a routine (if convoluted) thriller in which the poisoned protagonist attempts to track down his own killer. While the Davis version closely follows the dialogue and plot of Mate's film, the form and style of the Australian remake owes less to its precursor than it does to post-classical noirs (Harper, 1966; The Detective, 1968; Lady in Cement, 1968), and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–1959; Naked City, 1958–1963; The Fugitive, 1963–1967). This article looks at the antipodean, cultural remaking of D.O.A., historically situated midway between its classic original (1949) and its second, neo-noir remaking, D.O.A. (Morton and Jankel, 1988). The remake's television aesthetic (and US cable release) adds weight to the suggestion that, through the 1960s, the noir of the classic sensibility was kept alive mainly through television series.