 Starring: Edmond O’Brien, Paula Britton, Luther Adler
Director: Rudolph Maté
Year Of Release: 1950
Plot: A man wanders into a police station to report a murder – his own! The story then recounts in flashback businessman Frank Bigelow’s trip to San Francisco. Not long after he arrives, he discovers he’s been poisoned and doesn’t have long to live. He’s then in a desperate race against time to discover what’s going on, so he can uncover the murderers before he dies. |
Normally when people talk about high concept filmmaking, they think it only applies to modern movies that have relatively simple characters, a broad appeal and rely on genre conventions. Most important they have a premise that can summed up very succinctly, which makes it far easier to sell to an audience – after all, the longer it takes to explain, the longer there is to sow the seeds of doubt in a potential viewers mind (or at least that’s the thinking).
High concept is generally considered to have grown up around the same time as the modern blockbuster or at least because of the emergence of modern blockbusters. For example, after Jaws, the studios saw the ease with which it was possible to excite audiences with the simple idea of a shark terrorising a seaside community, and tried to come up with similarly simple ideas they could build movies around. From this arose an endless succession of movies where the main draw of the plot could be summed up in a single sentence – an alien hunter picks off mercenaries in the jungle (Predator), Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito are really brothers (Twins – selling stars and people’s expectations of them is a big part of high concept) or an asteroid is about to wipe out Earth (Armageddon, Deep Impact).
Since then we’ve gone onto high concept movies that are essentially designed as hybrids of other high concept movies, which is basically all those films described as ‘It’s ???? meets ????’. We even got to the point a couple of years ago when the high concept premise became the title – Snakes On A Plane. Even the modern love of remaking things, or basing movies on pre-existing properties, is part of the high concept desire to ensure it’s as easy as possible to entice a broad audience with simple ideas they already feel some sort of connection with.
However to my mind high concept isn’t a new innovation, it’s just got a name now and usually a lot more star power. Just take D.O.A., which was made in 1950 but may have the best high concept premise ever conceived – a poisoned man must investigate his own murder before he dies. It’s a stunningly good hook to hang a film on. It’s undoubtedly effective, as the film itself is often more than a little silly, from the made-up luminous poison that’s killing Frank Bigelow to the fact the score would fit better in a Mickey Mouse cartoon (it even incorporates wolf whistles whenever a beautiful woman passes by). However it’s carried along on its central premise, making it a far better and more intriguing film noir than it ought to be.
D.O.A. is certainly not the only high concept movie to come along long before the term was invented – in fact it was a bit of a standard for old b-movies. Most of the 1950s sci-fi b-movies, such as Tarantula and Attack Of The 50ft Woman, drew audiences not through the promise of great acting or fantastic dialogue, but from very simple but fun premises, with both those movies needing little more than the title to get audiences queuing up.
The main difference between old high concept films and the new ones is that rather than being the b-movie, they’re now the main event and it’s all done far more conscientiously, with everything from the initial idea to the marketing heavily targeted on making it as easy as possible to excite people with the central idea. In the modern day the idea of making films based on simple ideas has been turned into a bit of an artform.
Sadly few have ever come up with as good an idea as D.O.A. In fact it’s so good we could do with a high concept remake now. We may have already had a remake in 1969 (renamed Color Me Dead), and another starring Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in 1988, but neither of those were particularly good (although the fact it’s already been remade twice shows just what a good idea it is). After all, as Hollywood is currently obsessed with remakes, they might as well have another go at something with a great premise, rather than just anything that made than $10 at cinemas in the 1980s.
TIM ISAAC
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