A man comes staggering into a police station some time in the 1940s and demands to speak to the homicide desk. When he gets there, he says he wants to report a murder. “Whose murder?” asks the detective. He replies “my own.”

So begins DOA, one of the most creatively plotted of all film noirs. It tells the story of a notary public who discovers someone has slipped a toxic radioactive substance into his drink and he has only about 48 hours to solve his own murder. There is no possible cure.

This intriguing premise has often been criticized as unrealistic, but it really isn't. Fatal poisoning by radioactive material has been used as an assassination method on several occasions in the past decade or so, usually by members of the former Soviet Union intelligence agencies, and usually by slipping the radioactive substance into the victim's drink, just as in the movie. I don't know if the victims were left in any condition to run around the city trying to solve their own murders as in this film, but surely it's not too farfetched for a fictional story.

An extra benefit to this movie is the creepy, brilliantly-played hitman Chester, who tries to intimidate the man with nothing to lose into giving up his search for the truth. Of course, our man doesn't give up so easily, or he wouldn't be a doomed noir hero.

The movie was remade in the 1980s, but it really shouldn't have been. The original did not need fixing- see this version, and no other.