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).
'In the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reg Goldsworthy brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films, It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1969) and That Lady from Peking (1970). The second of these, Color Me Dead, was a direct (credited) remake of the film noir classic D.O.A. (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 (Harper, 1966; The Detective, 1968; Lady in Cement, 1968), and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–1959; Naked City, 1958– 1963; The Fugitive, 1963–1967). This article looks 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. (Morton and Jankel, 1988). The 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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reg Goldsworthy brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films, It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1969) and That Lady from Peking (1970). The second of these, Color Me Dead, was a direct (credited) remake of the film noir classic D.O.A. (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 (Harper, 1966; The Detective, 1968; Lady in Cement, 1968), and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–1959; Naked City, 1958– 1963; The Fugitive, 1963–1967). This article looks 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. (Morton and Jankel, 1988). The 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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
