Filmed in Australia, Colour Me Dead is a colour re-make of a 1950 American film noir production, D.O.A. (also written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Green, and starring Edmond O'Brien). This re-make had American actors in the lead roles (particularly Tom Tryon as Frank Bigelow), but an Australian supporting cast.
According to Eric Reade,
It centres around a young lawyer (Tom Tryon) who has been mysteriously poisoned and has only two days to discover who adminstered the fatal dose. Australian Tony Ward (now a current affairs commentator) played an excellent role as the villain who figured prominently in a savage fight scene in the hold of a ship, in which he kicked Tryon in the head after he fell. This sequence had been described as excessively violent, and had to be cut. It was this tangle with the censor that had delayed the release of the picture for four months.
(Source: History and Heartburn: The Saga of Australian Film, 1896-1978, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979, p.167).
