Jess Kirkpatrick | Through the Shattered Lens

Originally airing on November 28^th, 1958, “Another Barrier” opens with free-lance photographer, Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson), in the middle of the California desert working on a photo layout of Major Sandy Dickson (Grant Williams), a hotshot U.S. Air Force pilot who’s in the process of testing the latest X-2 plane. Kovac wants to follow Sandy around for a couple of days leading up the next big test flight, which means he also gets to meet Sandy’s fiancé, Liz (Norma Crane). While having dinner with the couple, Kovac sees just how scared and worried she is about her lover’s dangerous job. Sandy later confides to Mike that Liz has had bad luck with the “men in her life,” in this case being her father and her brother, who both died tragically years earlier. It seems she thinks her love is a curse, and now she’s afraid she’s going to pass it on to Sandy. Maybe she has a point, because on Sandy’s next test flight, his X-2 goes down, losing contact with the control tower ninety-four seconds after being released from its mothership B-50. With the rescue teams looking for Sandy, and with his survival chances being somewhere between slim and none, Kovac tells Liz what happened, and then takes her back to her apartment. Believing it’s her fault that Sandy’s plane went down, as soon as she gets her chance, Liz crawls out on the balcony of the top floor of her multi-story apartment complex. Kovac begins to try his best to convince her not to jump, to at least find out for sure if Sandy is dead or alive. But will anything work on a woman who’s convinced she’s a curse?!

This review may surprise some of my readers, but I didn’t really enjoy this episode at all. I didn’t like its entire concept. I enjoy episodes of the series where Kovac’s pictures help solve crimes, or he’s getting to mix it up with bullies and bad guys. This episode is just melodrama, and boring melodrama at that. Okay, so Sandy loves his job and Liz, and he wants Liz to accept the danger of his job, but she just seems to be a scared and anxious ball of emotions waiting around for him to die. And all Kovac does is take some pictures, listen to Sandy go on and on about Liz, and then beg Liz not to jump once everyone thinks he’s as dead as a doornail. Boring! About the only mildly amusing thing that happens is when Kovac convinces Sandy that a picture of a pilot in his long johns is just what the layout really needs. Boring AND kinda creepy! And I know that Norma Crane is a fine actress, having recently reviewed her episode of ALFRED HITHCOCK PRESENTS: “There Was an Old Woman,” where she also works with Bronson. They were good together in that episode, but neither have anything to work with when it comes to this story. She’s sad and wants to die, and he’s worried and doesn’t want her to jump. The characters barely know each other, having only met the day before, and the drama does not play out convincingly at all. Grant Williams is likewise boring as the “hot shot” Sandy Jackson. If the Air Force wanted to feature a pilot, they should have probably found one with at least a little bit of personality. I’ve always said that I love Bronson so much that I’d pay to watch him read the phone book. Good Lord willing, this episode is the closest I’ll ever get to seeing that happen.

There was one interesting thing that I noted while watching “Another Barrier,” and that’s the connection that its plot shares with a movie that Charles Bronson would star in a few years later, X-15 (1961), the theatrical debut of director Richard Donner. In X-15, which includes narration by the legendary James Stewart, Bronson plays an Air Force pilot with the dangerous job of testing X-planes, and Patricia Owens is his wife who’s worried about him back at home. It’s not one of Bronson’s best, and frankly, it’s kind of boring too. There may be a great movie or show about X-plane test pilots out there. I just know they don’t star Charles Bronson!

The 12th film contained in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set is the classic film noir D.O.A. Before I get into reviewing this film, there’s an oddity that I feel the need to point out. According to the back of the Fabulous Forties box, D.O.A. was released in 1949. However, according to Wikipedia, imdb, and almost every other source out there, D.O.A. was released in 1950. In short, it’s debatable whether or not D.O.A. actually belongs in the Fabulous Forties box set but it really doesn’t matter. D.O.A. is a classic and, along with Night of the Living Dead, it is undoubtedly one of the best B-movies to ever slip into the public domain.

D.O.A. opens with a lengthy tracking shot, following a man named Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) as he walks through the hallways of a San Francisco police station. Frank walks with a slow, halting movement and it’s obvious that he is not a healthy man. When he finally steps into a detective’s office, Frank announces that he’s come to the station to report a murder — his own.

Frank is a small-town accountant who came to San Francisco for a vacation. After a long night of drinking, Frank woke up feeling ill. When he went to a doctor, he was informed of two things. Number one, he was in overall good health. Number two, he only had a few days to live. Sometime during the previous night, Frank was poisoned with a “luminous toxin.” There was no antidote.

The rest of the film follows Frank as he attempts to figure out who poisoned him and why. It’s an intriguing mystery and I’m not going to ruin it by going into too many details. Over the course of his investigation, the increasingly desperate Frank comes across a gangster named Majak (Luther Adler). This leads to a lengthy scene in which Majak’s psychotic henchman, Chester (Neville Brand), repeatedly punches Frank in the stomach. It’s a scene that, even in our far more desensitized times, made me cringe. I can only imagine how audiences in 1950 reacted.

(There’s also a shoot-out at a drug store that can stand alongside almost any modern-day action sequence. Regardless of whether the film was made in 1949 or 1950, it still feels like a movie that could have just as easily been made in 2016.)

But really, the mystery is secondary. Instead, D.O.A. is truly about Frank and how he deals with the knowledge that he is going to die. Before being poisoned, Frank is the epitome of complacent, middle-class suburbia. He’s engaged to Paula (Pamela Britton) but he’s in no hurry to marry her. He’s got all the time in the world. When Frank goes to San Francisco, he epitomizes the bourgeoisie on vacation. He goes to the 1940s equivalent of a hipster nightclub, not because he’s actually interested in what the scene is all about but because he’s a tourist looking for a story to tell the folks back home. When he checks into his hotel, he leers at every passing woman with a casual sexism that would not be out-of-place on an old episode of Mad Men. Frank is floating through life, confident in his own complacency.

It’s only after he’s poisoned that Frank actually starts to live. He goes from being passive to being aggressive. Knowing that he’s going to die, he no longer has anything to lose. Only with death approaching does Frank actually start to live. Frank’s realization that he waited to long to live makes his final line all the more poignant.

D.O.A. is a classic! Watch it below, you won’t be sorry!