A Long Lost CPA Movie Thriller

Since becoming empty nesters – at least for the duration of the 2016-2017 academic year – the bride and I have enjoyed frequent date nights and that includes regular movie viewings, something we only did in 20^th century B.C. – before children.

Last week it was “The Girl on the Train” which despite receiving mediocre reviews I enjoyed and a film that will surely propel its star – Emily Blunt – into the Oscar conversation.

Saturday we plan to see “The Accountant” in which Ben Affleck plays an autistic green-eyeshader who just happens to moonlight as an assassin with skills that go far beyond computing goodwill or completing a K-1.

I got to thinking about some of the famous accountants in the movies – as I’m sure everyone who either blogs or writes on the profession is sure to do in the ensuing weeks since the film’s debut.

I know I’m a bit off topic here, actually way off topic, but sometimes I feel readers need a welcome diversion since there are just so many articles you can write about succession planning or M&A.

But I digress.

Like anything else, I’m sure many of you in the profession have a favorite accountant role in Hollywood, but in the category of nobody asked me but…mine is an often forgotten picture titled D.O.A.

No, not the sub-par remake of 1990, but the original 1950 gem with Edmond O’Brien.

In, it O’Brien plays Frank Bigelow, a CPA with a small office in the California desert, who enters a Los Angeles police station in the opening scene wanting to report a murder. When the desk sergeant asks whose murder, O’Brien calmly answers, “mine.”

Well before Quentin Tarantino used it to perfection in Reservoir Dogs and later Pulp Fiction, the movie employs a series of flashbacks as we learn that Bigelow has been fatally poisoned  and has just a few days to find out who did it and why.

D.O.A. perfectly captures the zeitgeist of early 1950s Los Angeles, a film noir we would see decades later in movies such as L.A. Confidential.

When the buzz surrounding The Accountant begins to die down as it invariably will, you just may want to sit back and enjoy a film that hasn’t lost its pop some 65 years later.

And I’m not going to tell you whodunit.