8 - Color Me Dead (1970)

Summary

FILM NOIR IN THE ANTIPODES

In the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reginald Goldsworthy (of Goldsworthy Productions) brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films: It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1970) and That Lady from Peking (1970). Generically similar crime-thrillers, each film was made in collaboration with senior American partner, Commonwealth United Corporation, on a modest budget and with American actors mainly known for their work in television and B-movies in the lead roles (O’Brien 1970b: 35).1 The second film, Color Me Dead, stands apart from the others for being a direct remake of the film noir classic, D.O.A. (Rudolph 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 Maté's film, the form and style of the Australian remake owes less to its precursor than it does to post-classical noirs (such as Harper, Jack Smight, 1966; The Detective, Gordon Douglas, 1968; Lady in Cement, Gordon Douglas, 1968) and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–9; Naked City, 1958–63; The Fugitive, 1963–7). In this chapter we look 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. (Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1988). The Australian 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 and movies, some of which embraced an increased transnationalism. The Australian remake also demonstrates something of the way in which the development and expansion of ‘international’ film noir – as an ‘artistic impulse to represent global modernity and its psycho-sexual anxieties’ (Petty 2016: – extends well beyond France and the US.

In More Than Night, James Naremore describes the category of film noir not as a set of narrative or stylistic features, but as a discursive formation: ‘film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema … [I]t has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse’ (Naremore 1998: 11).