Crime Unlimited

Lovely Lilli Palmer made her film debut in this routine British quota film, Crime Unlimited, from 1935.

She stars with Esmond Knight in this drama about an undercover police office infiltrating a gang of jewel thieves and attempting to meet the unseen leader, Maddick. Along the way, he meets Natacha (Palmer), part of the crime team, but who wants out.

This is a pretty good film, nothing special, but it was certainly fun to see the nearly unrecognizable Palmer. Esmond Knight, in his twenties here, lived to be 80 and worked until the very end, despite being blind for two years after the war and losing an eye.

Though "Crime Unlimited" has quite a different "feel" from what a Warners U.S. production on the same plot premise would have — the American version would have moved a lot faster and would have had wall-to-wall background music (this one doesn't have an underscore at all!) — it's quite a good movie and makes one wish more of the Teddington productions existed. (About 100 were made while Warners owned the studio but only about one-third of them survive — and among the lost is the one most everyone would most want to see: "Murder at Monte Carlo," Errol Flynn's first starring role and the film that convinced Jack Warner that Flynn belonged in Hollywood.) Its debt to the Holmes-Moriarty story and especially to Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films is pretty evident — the villain is a man who, to preserve his incognito, meets his confederates in a secret room and communicates with them only by intercom — but it's well plotted, the denouement makes sense and Esmond Knight is a personable hero, handsome but also quite a good actor who effectively projects the character's combination of courage and naïveté. But the film belongs to Lilli Palmer, whose performance would jump out at you even if you didn't know she would become a star later on; playing the most conflicted character in the story, she makes her rich and complex and brings her dilemmas home. Ralph Ince's direction could have used more of a sense of atmosphere (though it was clear from some of the setups in the villain's headquarters that he'd screened Lang's Mabuse films), and there are a few points where the pace slackened and the film seemed dull, but overall "Crime Unlimited" is quite a good piece of work and the British audiences who saw it in 1935 were probably entertained even while waiting for the big Warners Hollywood production they'd actually paid to see.

I am currently reading the autobiography of Edmond Knight.He was contracted by Irving Asher to make quota quickies.He considered this to be one of the better ones.He had done screen tests with four potential leading ladies when he was asked to do a fifth.The actress was Lilli Palmer. The film used one of Edgar Wallace's favourite pot devices.The gang controlled by a mysterious unknown leader. Ralph Ince,brother of Thomas,directs at speed

This proves that with a good scripted, intelligent story, a film doesn't need a big budget to enjoyable. For a change, cheap tacky production and unimaginative direction actually results in a fairly riveting little picture.

Former American bit-part player, now English quota quickie director Ralph Ince injects gallons of life into this. It's all go - there's never a dull moment - it's all action. Ince doesn't do anything particularly interesting, clearly he was no Hitchcock but the story is so fast, you don't get a chance to notice. The acting is also pretty decent too: Edmond Knight is surprisingly charismatic as the undercover cop. Twenty year old blonde Lilli Palmer doesn't look anything like the lovely Lilli Palmer we're used to seeing but nevertheless gives a believable performance.

A lot of Britain's early thirties cheap quota quickies were atrocious but they shouldn't all be tarred with the same brush. This is....well not a classic but in a different league to its contemporaries. If you like a good old exciting police story, you might enjoy this.

I just saw this on TCM as part of six Teddington studios Warner Bros. made-in-England so-called Quota Quickies never meant for export outside England. I am very impressed. English actors are in every way superior to their American counterparts of the time. The dialogue is literate, as can be expected from a people who made "talking pictures" instead of "movies", like the expression goes. This undercover-cop-acting-as-a-jewel-thief story has all the action elements that one can expect from the Fritz Lang-inspired melodramas of the time and that have survived in the Adventures of Tintin: hidden lairs with two-way mirrors and secret passages, car pursuits, death by piped-in gas, an arch-villain with a double identity who happens to be bordering on lunacy, etc. But the proceedings are saved by the extreme intelligence of the principals: Lilli Palmer, in her first English-language film, and Esmond Knight, a Michael Powell regular, who had absolutely everything to become a sexier, more proactive and muscular Laurence Olivier, but whose career was cut short by his losing an eye in WWII, after which he took on extremely surprising and varied character roles. The films in the Paddington treasure trove are absolutely pristine in image and sound and put to shame many films of the period as far as conservation goes. The direction by a stalwart of the Hollywood system is also equally brilliant. In short, films like this one make it hard to understand why the British public would prefer the American product and the terrible things that have been written about them.