Appointment with Danger is a serviceable, if slight, 1950 crime film enlivened by two unusual factors. The first is obvious from the start, and the second sneaks up on you.
The obvious appeal here is the unexpected (indeed, almost unheard-of) angle: Post Office noir! Post Office noir in Gary, Indiana, no less. I was raised a Hoosier, and while I guess Gary has probably gotten airtime in various Michael Jackson-related pictures I haven’t seen, it’s not exactly a major on-screen presence. Compared to New York or Los Angeles, it’s a novelty, just as Alan Ladd’s grouchy, laser-focused postal inspector is a novelty compared to a cop or a private eye. If you can’t offer true originality, offbeat specificity can make for a fine second-best. Appointment with Danger, as a bonus, throws in a nun, Sister Augustine (Phyllis Calvert), who occupies the same niche as an imperiled love interest in a more standard movie—she’s a witness whose goodness and resilience sands away a few of Ladd’s character’s rough edges—but whose devotion to her vows (and eventually fielding a solid Major League team out of her school’s alumni) is never in doubt.
But just as Sister Augustine fills a familiar niche in an unfamiliar way, Al Goddard (Ladd) is, despite the enlivening cosmetic changes that come with his unusual profession, still essentially a cop, and he finds himself embroiled in a standard enough undercover plot. A murder reveals the planning stages of an armed robbery, and Goddard, playing crooked—he’s really only callous, and even then, he’s not that much of a prick—eventually talks his way into the middle of it, informed and in jeopardy at the same time. The film isn’t devoid of tension, but you’ll check your watch a few times.
There’s one scene where you definitely won’t, though, and that’s when Jan Sterling’s Dodie, an amiable chatterbox, moll-adjacent but not fully in the life, briefly takes center stage. Dodie is in a relationship with the robbery plan’s mover and shaker, Boettiger (Paul Stewart), and that’s kept her on the edges of the conspiracy all along, despite her semi-legitimate job at his hotel. She’s funny and flirty and knowing, and then she knows too much: She walks in on Goddard making a phone call that instantly reveals he’s a mole. Sterling plays the scene perfectly, with the sense of shutters closing across Dodie’s face as she almost immediately accepts what must come next. She knows what she needs to do to keep her life the way she wants it, and she admits—to Goddard and to herself—that that’s her priority, but this doesn’t make her cold-hearted. She refuses, in fact, to pretend she’s taking a moral stance in protecting Goddard’s secret. She’s revealed as someone coolly rational enough to betray, when necessary, but emotional enough to feel the moral weight of that betrayal even as she commits herself to it. It’s a short scene, and it technically has no impact on the plot: Dodie choosing not to act on what she’s heard erases the fact that she’s heard it. But this bubble of conscious inaction that lets the story carry on is, hands down, the best and most memorable scene here, one that elevates a minor supporting character to a dramatic force in a matter of seconds. No wonder Sterling immediately went on to be a capable opposite number to Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole.
Appointment with Danger is streaming on Kanopy.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Tangentially related but my only real knowledge of Gary, Indiana is the song from The Music Man, one I’ve been able to sing from memory since childhood. “If you’d like to have a logical explanation/How I happened on this elegant syncopation/I will say without a moment of hesitation/There is just one place that can light my face!”
It does have elegant syncopation! That’s one of the few things it has going for it at this point, alas.
What did we watch?
Miles Ahead – I only recently became aware that Don Cheadle had written, directed and starred in an unconventional Miles Davis biopic, thanks to one of those daily movie quiz games. I can’t resist a Cheadle triple-threat, even if I am “Jazz skeptical”. This film largely takes place in Davis’ “silent period” where he didn’t release anything for five years (1975-80) and apparently barely played the trumpet. The idea is to explore his creative process and what led it to break down, and how he recovered from that… but the way it does that is by mixing fact and fiction liberally and having Miles go on a madcap adventure to recover some session master tapes after they get stolen by Michael Stuhlbarg for some reason. I don’t think it QUITE works but it’s certainly more interesting than a straight-up biopic, and it has a ton of that “actor turns director and wants to show off every stylistic quirk they’ve ever dreamed of” charm, with the narrative bouncing back and forth between the present and the past and a ton of mad flashy shots because hey! It’s Jazz, Baby! Cheadle is solidly very good, as he is in basically every film apart from the Oceans trilogy (that accent is unforgivable, sorry) and he clearly put a ton of work into the performance scenes feeling believable which is much appreciated. An interesting curio for sure.
I appreciate that they committed to making this title a pun.
Davis got there first though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Ahead_(album)
Even better!
The Brink’s Job – In 1950, a gang of thieves stole over $2.7 million in cash and checks from a depository in Boston owned by Brink’s. While the culprits were caught years later, the money was never recovered. This is the fairly accurate story of how it happened, and it turns out it was a comedy? Or at least it was supposed to be funny, but William Friedkin, otherwise a very good director, is not really the right person for comedy. The on location shooting and recreations of 50s Boston are great, and the cast is solid, but the tonal shifts weaken the final product. Peter Falk is fun as the ringleader, Peter Boyle and Paul Sorvino very good as two key parts of the team, but Warren Oates as WWII veteran with an expertise in demolitions and signs of PTSD steals the show. Look for Gena Rowlands as Falk’s wife (alas no cameo by Casavettes).
Elementary, “It Serves You Right to Suffer” – When Joan’s ex-con friend Shinwell is implicated in a gangland murder, she and Sherlock bend over backwards to clear his name. And learn that he has not rejoined his old gang, he’s become an FBI informant. The mystery here isn’t very interesting, but the character work with Shinwell, who really does want to clean up his act, and the FBI agent, who turns out to be corrupt while justifying his actions, is quite good. Directed by Aidan Quinn, who does pretty okay.
Barney Miller, “Block Party” – Wojo and Wentworth are now a couple, and Wentworth is annoyed when she’s denied a collar by a sexist lieutenant from Manhattan South (who will be a frequent thorn in Barney’s side). Entertaining enough but on the forgettable side.
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode One, “Weird: Layer 01”
This is another one of those shows – possibly the last ever? – that I’ve been meaning to watch for literal decades; it came out in 1998, and since then it’s been regarded as one of the greatest anime ever made, with incredibly prescient takes on the internet and how it would change our lives. Well, it’s fantastic to say that it already lives up to the hype; this could not be more my shit. The central ethos, permeating everything from story to visuals to sound design, seems to be ‘how little can we tell the audience without telling them nothing?’, which hypes me the fuck up. This is a series that delves into abstraction; the plot is that a schoolgirl commits suicide, only for her classmates to receive emails from her afterwards claiming that she’s kept alive through the internet; Lain, one of the schoolmates, decides to upgrade her computer with the help of her tech-savvy father.
And that’s pretty much it for this episode. The real meat is in the way this is all conveyed; everything is as sparse as possible, with the scenes on trains practically taking place in white space. Scenes with people have long spaces between banal dialogue (reminds me of Mad Men), and the bare sound design unsettles like the prelude to a horror movie (not a good show if you have misophonia). This contrasts heavily with the visions or dreams or whatever they are; the climax of the episode is a vision Lain has of the girl jumping in front of a train, which seems to settle her desire to know her better. These are lively visions filled with surreal music and imagery.
All of this serves to sell us on Lain’s sense of disconnection. Other people are frequently reduced to abstractions and usually make only the barest sense. Instead, her inner life is lively and loud and exciting; not in a Walter Mitty kind of way, but simply being full of stimulus and information. This is going to be interesting to connect to the internet; I’m one of many who found more to believe in in the internet, from its Wild West days to now. I could never fully connect to people around me, and the internet gave me a place where my values were real and solid things. And it’s nice to watch something that fits in a Venn diagram of arthouse, good, and having something to say; this doesn’t even have the trappings of genre to ground it, it’s just trippy shit, but it does clearly have something to say and a specific emotional state to sit in.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Six, “The War On Alcohol”
Another banger. This show really makes the whole “television is always like three or four years behind on the conversation” thing work simply because the Gang are consistently and thoroughly out of touch as it is; it was about the halfway point when they’d lost touch with reality that this really started clicking for me (which is also a demonstration of how the show makes itself with through sheer persistence).
Biggest laugh: “Ladies and gentlemen… the perfect secretary.”
Garth Marengi’s Darkplace, “Once Upon A Beginning” – Showed it to my friend who’d never seen or even heard of it. A clear inspiration for the Always Sunny Lethal Weapon episodes and other comedy depicting deliberate, egregiously bad filmmaking and acting; you have to know the rules to break them and it makes the piss poor blocking, editing, and directing funnier. It makes it apparent how as audiences we accept certain conventions because otherwise it’d look insane, like Garth walking across the cemetery set for a really, really long time before he joins the funeral, the camera staying static. In real life, this is normal, and in TV and film, it saps the scene of drama and looks ludicrous. The Hellraiser, Stephen King promos, and bad TV movie nods rule of course, though I have only seen The Stand as far as King mini-series go. “I’ve never been afraid of holding a man’s gaze – it’s natural.” “We’re doing all we can. But I’m not Jesus Christ. I’ve come to accept that now.”
Hell yeah Darkplace. I’ve been lucky enough to see the whole thing screened for a crowd once and the opportunity has arisen again in a few weeks time… very tempted. I wonder if people will boo the Graham Linehan cameo nowadays .
Heh, I’ve only seen him in older/awful form, so I’m not even sure who he played on the show.
Year of the Month updates:
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
And here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown