Appointment With Danger

Opening with a semi-documentary voice-over providing an ode to the United States Post Office, Lewis Allen’s Appointment With Danger is rarely mentioned in inventories of great noirs but it’s a solid representation of the style with the added peculiarity of a female lead character about as far from a traditional femme fatale as one can get: Sister Augustine (Phyllis Calvert) is a charming Catholic nun (“People don’t pray to keep from dying; they pray to avoid being disappointed when they do”). Alan Ladd stars as post office inspector Al Goddard who’s assigned to investigate the murder of another inspector outside the Compton Hotel one rainy night; Sister Augustine, who happened to be walking nearby, got a good look at the two killers (played by Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, who would much later co-star in television’s revamped “Dragnet”), which means now she’s got a target on her back. After Goddard secretly re-locates Sister Augustine to a new convent in another city (and arming her with a gun), he connects the murderers to the owner of the Compton, Earl Boetticher (Paul Stewart), who heads a gang with imminent plans to hold up a train shipping a million dollars in cash. While Calvert is excellent, she’s nearly upstaged by Jan Sterling as Boetticher’s Queens-accented, gum-smacking mistress Dodie, who has a special fondness for jazz (“It gets you right in the bread basket”) and for handsome postal inspectors.