Appointment with Boredom
“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” This is Sturgeon’s Law, and it has been repeated by many people. Actor William Windom raised the bar, saying “ninety percent of everything is horsecrap and 5% is godawful.” Well, Appointment with Danger (1950) is a dried-out little horse turd of a movie. It isn’t godawful, but it’d be more entertaining if it was. The acting is uninspired, the characters are annoying, the plot is irritating. The only reason I watched it was because I thought it would be funny to see Jack Webb beat Harry Morgan to death with bronzed baby shoes. It was, but I could have skipped the whole movie. I’m glad I didn’t pay any money to watch this. Where Brute Force is suspenseful, taut, interesting, Appointment with Danger is dull, clumsy, and irritating. It was dreck, dreck, dreck. I want my hour and a half back.
Look, this could have been an okay film: the premise is interesting (postal inspector goes undercover in Indiana). I like Indiana. I almost was a Purdue Boilermaker, and it’s nice to get out of the city. Richard Breen was one of the writers, so you know there’ll be punchy dialogue. Postal inspectors are really the oldest operating police force in the U.S., and they did help convict former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. But I had my hopes dashed with the film’s beginning: the viewer gets a minute and a half of advertising for the U.S. Postal Service. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” blah, blah, blah, the USPS is great, we get it. Getting jealous of the FBI, Post Office?
Okay, okay, there have been good films with bad openings, we can push through. The true noir opening is much more interesting. It begins in Gary, Indiana. We see two figures standing over a man on a bed. One of them is coiling up a rope. “The Friendly Hotel,” the neon proclaims, although if they provide strangulation services to their guests, they might have to rethink that. Then we see the two driving to La Porte. But wait! It’s Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon from Dragnet (1967).
Well, what an interesting first meeting! In all seriousness, before Jack Webb was established as Joe Friday, he took minor parts in movies, often playing scumbags. This is where Webb and Morgan met; they would collaborate several times on Dragnet (1949) and Dragnet (1951) before Dragnet (1967). We watch them dump the man’s body in an alley, but a passing nun (Phyllis Calvert) sees them. She alerts the police, who find the body but no bad guys. The dead man is Harry Gruber, a postal inspector doing rounds of Indiana. The post office detective assigned to find the murderers is Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) (cute, writers, cute), from Chicago. He’s “a good cop, but that’s all [he is].” Oh, we know, movie, we know. He immediately sets out to find the nun, who doesn’t understand what she saw. He runs to hop a freight train, then runs to hop a bus, in one of the movie’s two funny scenes. He finds the nun in Fort Wayne (about 130 miles and 2.5 hours away from Gary). She has to be convinced to go look at mugshots in Gary. “I don’t think so, I have classes in a few minutes. I’ve got children to teach. Couldn’t you get someone else?” she says, like she’s trying to get out of jury duty. Then Goddard smirkingly pulls out Martin Luther to convince her to go. Ugh. Goddard is supposed to not be a nice guy, I get it. Noir is built on not-nice guy protagonists. There’s Out of the Past, The Maltese Falcon, In A Lonely Place, The Postman Always Rings Twice, etc, etc. But there’s a difference between ruthlessness and being obnoxious. And this nun! The writers were going for a pure and innocent vibe, but instead they made her dim and naive. She’s written to be a contrast to Goddard’s harshness, but she’s just a different kind of annoying.
Finally, she agrees to go look at the mugbooks. She recognizes George Soderquist (Morgan) but not Joe Regas (Webb). Goddard and the Gary police see Soderquist with a postal worker named Paul Ferrar (Stacy Harris). There doesn’t seem to be any connection between a drunk driving, draft-dodger like Soderquist and a squeaky-clean driver like Ferrar. In fact, he’s so clean that he turned down a 500-dollar-a-year raise to stay with the post office. You can’t buy loyalty like that. Goddard figures it out: there’s a train stop in Gary where one million dollars has to be transferred by truck. While this is happening, Soderquist realizes he’s been seen and hides out in his boss Earl’s (Paul Stewart) hotel. His boss and Joe decide he needs to get out of town, pronto. But Soderquist knows his pals too well: he knows he won’t get any money that way. He refuses, all while waving around photos of his kid. His wife left him, see, and he ain’t seen his kid in years. (You know, I think Soderquist treated his family better than the actor did. There’s no mention of Soderquist being a wife-beater.)
In a pretty extreme reaction to being shown baby photos, Joe beats his friend to death with his son’s bronzed baby shoe. Good God. They then dump the body at an ironworks. While this is happening, Goddard decides on his own to pressure Ferrar: tell him he’s a dirty postal inspector and he’ll frame Ferrar for Gruber’s murder unless he gets $25,000. Ferrar’s stuck: he doesn’t have the money. So, he gets Goddard kidnapped and taken to his boss’s crummy hotel. There he meets the boss, Joe, two other members of the crew, and Dottie (Jan Sterling). Dottie is a typical bad-guy moll. She’s apparently the hotel stenographer, but all she seems to do is listen to jazz. Joe immediately dislikes Goddard, though he shouldn’t take it personally: Joe tells Dottie to go “swallow a germ” at breakfast. The boss, for some reason, likes Goddard. What is it with heist bosses in these movies? They are terrible judges of character. Goddard enlists his exasperated coworkers to help establish his dirty cop bonafides, and he passes the test.
The boss has a super great plan that isn’t really explained: he’s going to rob the million-dollar mail truck via a bread truck, block off side roads so other traffic is delayed, get into a car, switch cars, and then lay low until the heat’s off. Goddard thinks it can work, so he explains that he has to go on pretending to investigate Gruber’s murder, while actually investigating the heist crew. Stupidly, he is overheard discussing the case by Ferrar, who then follows him to where Soderquist’s body was found. (Wow, these clowns can’t get rid of bodies at all, can they?) Ferrar sneaks around, but is noticed by the cops. They chase him all over the ironworks, but he gets away. (It looks like an actual ironworks, so maybe this is somewhere on location?) Well, that’s not good for Goddard. He decides to get to the boss, and hopefully intercept Ferrar. Luckily, Goddard does intercept Ferrar, and takes him in. The cops’ plan is to arrest the robbers at point C, after they rob the truck. But the boss, right before the heist, changes the location of point C and doesn’t tell Goddard where it is. Goddard manages to tell his coworkers that the plan needs to change, but he’s overheard by Dottie. In a tense scene, with Earl in the next room, Dottie explains that she doesn’t love Earl enough to go to prison with him. She won’t tell; instead, she’s going to “forgot [their] names, [their] faces, and what’s going to happen [to them] in a hour.”
The plan goes forward, but not without a hitch: Joe sees the nun and kidnaps her, taking her to point C and leaving his crew in the lurch. They grab the money, but nearly crash into a bus. They make it to the new point C, but the boss is freaking out, and he isn’t calmed by Joe insisting they have to kill the nun right now. Goddard convinces him to not kill the nun, but then she pipes up and says she won’t keep quiet. Sister, have you ever heard the verse “be as wily as serpents and as gentle as doves”? Goddard then has to kill Joe, and the nun accidentally says his name. Lady… At this point, is stupidity a sin? Would she have to confess this? The boss has lost it at this point and decides to use Goddard as a human shield. Goddard’s coworkers finally arrive, and there’s a shootout. All the members of the heist crew except Ferrar are dead now. (He should be grateful for getting arrested. Goddard saved his life.) The movie ends happily, with the nun finally packed off back to Fort Wayne, and Goddard concluding that maybe he could try to be a good person.
These actors did not impress me. The only interesting ones were Jack Webb as the quick-to-kill Joe Regas and Jan Sterling as the sleazy Dottie. It’s funny to see Webb as a bad guy. He wouldn’t play one again after Dark City (1950). Instead, he would typecast himself as squeaky-clean authority figures, with the success of Dragnet. I never realized how skinny Webb was until I saw him here. He looks like a walking beanpole. He also spends most of his time complaining, so he’s two for two in comparison to my cat. Only time will tell if he likes Friskies.
Alan Ladd is smug and stiff as Detective Al Goddard. It honestly makes me wonder why he ever was a big star. The less said about Phyllis Calvert’s Sister Augustine, the better. A picture of Soderquist and Regas dumping the body would have been easier to work with. At least a picture wouldn’t expose Goddard as an undercover cop. And the plot was little better than the actors. Don’t know how the heist is going to work, what they’re doing, or even where point C is? No matter, have another fight scene. The plot depends mainly on luck? Have Ladd smirk some. The only good thing about this movie was the dialogue; Richard Breen, one of the writers, was known for his devastating writing, and boy, did he deliver. (He also worked with Jack Webb on several radio shows.) Great lines include:
Maury: “You don’t know what a love affair is.
Goddard: “It’s what goes on between a man and a .45 pistol that won’t jam.”
Goddard: “When a cop dies, they don’t listen to his heart fade. It’s a charley horse in the chest.”
Goddard has just punched out Regas.
Earl: “You worried, Al?”
Goddard: “About Regas? Yeah, I hate to see him in such pain.”
He drops a towel full of ice on Regas’s face.
Earl: “Forget about the nun, Joe! I’m still running things, remember that.”
Joe: “They ever get me in the back room of that police station, it’ll be on the tip of my tongue.”
To Joe, who will murder two people by the movie’s end.
Earl: “They ever tell you about murder? It’s against the law.”
And the kicker:
After Dottie doesn’t tell Earl about Goddard being undercover
Goddard: “You won’t get a gold star, but thanks, anyway.”
Dottie: “Don’t bother. Earl was good to me. I hope he kills you.”
Look, this is not a good movie. It’s not an awful movie, like ones on MST3K, but it’s not good. This is a movie for Alan Ladd or Jack Webb completionists, or if you use movies to fall asleep, or if the only other things on TCM are musicals. Don’t waste your time; go watch Brute Force or something else interesting.
