Appointment With Crime

“Just like falling off a log.” One of the most stylized of all the British noirs, John Harlow’s Appointment With Crime is dark, cold, and brutal, beginning with its frenetic opening act that jumps from a smash-and-grab gone wrong in broad daylight to a crowded bar scene with a jazz band tearing it up to a montage of Dutch angles and composite shots leading into a shadowy flashback. Sounding almost cognitively impaired throughout, William Hartnell stars as embittered thief Leo Martin, just released from prison and ready to take revenge on the criminals who had recruited him for the job but abandoned him to his penitential fate (“They said they’d never let me down and they did”): Gus Loman (Raymond Lovell) and Hatchett (H. Victor Weske). Leo steals Loman’s pistol to shoot Hatchett dead, setting up a perfect frame, but he’s unaware that Loman had stolen the gun from his boss, the elegant antiques dealer and violent criminal Gregory Lang (Herbert Lom, whose presence elevates any film considerably), spinning a web of blackmail and betrayal alongside the police investigation led by Detective Inspector Rogers (Robert Beatty). Joyce Howard plays the tough Dance Palace taxi dancer, Carol Dane, whom Leo decides will be his lover, and Alan Wheatley plays the film’s other “love interest,” Noel Penn, Lang’s effete henchman and (almost certainly) homosexual lover (“Let’s have a tiny drinkie,” Penn says teasingly when the two are left alone).