The popular Canadian detective series, Murdoch Mysteries, is now in its sixteenth season. By the time the final episode of this season airs later this summer, the count will have reached in excess of 260 episodes! (My bride and I love this show, and we’ve seen them all. Check out my post, “And This Week’s Guest Star Is…H.G. Wells?”) You would think it quite a challenge to keep each episode fresh.
WHY BLACK AND WHITE?
Which brings me to a recent episode of the current series, just under halfway through. An opening message advised viewers that the episode, titled “D.O.A.” or “Dead on Arrival”, would be presented in black and white. Hmm, that’s interesting. We then stagger down a street with an obviously distressed Detective William Murdoch, who enters station house #4 of the Toronto Constabulary, continues to lurch down a long hallway, then attacks the station’s pathologist, accusing her of poisoning him. From there the story takes us back twelve hours to show how we arrived at the attention-grabbing first scene.
Affected by the poison, Murdoch is not quite himself.
Presenting the episode in black and white was meant as an homage to the noir mystery/detective films of the 1940s and ’50s, specifically a 1950 classic of the genre, titled—you guessed it—D.O.A. The film starred Edmond O’Brien, and it opened with his character, an accountant named Frank Bigelow, walking down the long hallway of a police station, where he reports his own murder by poisoning. From there—stop me if you heard this—the story takes us back in time to show how we arrived at the attention-grabbing first scene.
A SAD LEGACY
Okay, homage accomplished. The stories differ from there, and the outcomes for Frank Bigelow and William Murdoch are decidedly different. Perhaps most fascinating for the latter is what/who he sees as he draws closer to his demise: the Angel of Death, in the form of a beautiful but hard-edged woman who rails at him for taking too long to die. Seriously creepy. In any case, the story was riveting, and it is definitely in my top five episodes of Murdoch Mysteries.
As for the noir film, D.O.A.: this film was so well-received that in 2004 it was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” But sadly, a legal screw-up saw it fall into the public domain, and it has been remade no less than three times. If you’re interested, the films are Color Me Dead (1969), D.O.A. (1988), with Dennis Quaid, and Dead On Arrival (2017).
A postscript: after writing this article I found the film on Prime and viewed it. Worth all the accolades, to be sure. But I have to say it is SO 1950, smoking, sexism and all. Every time Frank Bigelow ogles a woman, we hear a wolf whistle in the background. That said, Edmond O’Brien gave a solid performance as the doomed man.