Appointment with Murder

APPOINTMENT WITH MURDER is a late entry in a long-running series of films about The Falcon, an international crime fighter who tours the globe bringing various criminals to justice. I haven't seen any of these films before - at least, I don't think I have - so I wasn't sure what to expect from this one.

What I got was a murky little potboiler with a few neat action sequences to recommend it, but a film which is overall let down by a convoluted plot line and a poor choice of hero. The pockmarked John Calvert has a face that is permanently contorted into a sneer, so he ends up looking more like a villainous henchman than the hero of the piece. By contrast one of this movie's chief villains looks like a cuddly teddy bear so you can't take him seriously as a menacing figure.

The plot is about the hunt for a couple of stolen and priceless paintings but it doesn't really amount to much apart from lots of back and forth sort of stuff with the authorities and some tacked-on romance type material. You have to laugh at the way the police don't bother getting involved in the proceedings and corpses are left laying around at various intervals. I didn't mind the brief fight scenes but overall APPOINTMENT WITH MURDER is a letdown.

In the second of three 'Falcon' mysteries starring John Calvert, he is working for Lyle Talbot's insurance company recovering stolen paintings. The trail leads to Italy, where an interesting variation on the 'Gold Ring' confidence game is in operation. Artist Peter Brocco offers Calvert a painting by the artist of the stolen paintings. While Calvert is thinking the deal over -- because he's not sure they're real -- he is offered a huge profit on them; the confidence game will end after he has paid and taken possession, whereupon they will be stolen from him.

It's a nicely tangled mystery that leads him to Catherine Craig, a gallery owner and art authenticator in Los Angeles, and cross and double cross. Every time Calvert seems to have been swindled, he gets out of it with such nonchalant ease that all suspense is drained out of the movie: demonstrating that it takes more than a pencil-thin mustache, an erratic Ronald Colman imitation, and the writers on your side to make a movie star.

Not that RKO was the cream of studios in Hollywood. But those Falcon movies that were done there looked like Gone With The Wind next to these last Falcon movies with John Calvert. In fact this independent makes a typical PRC film look good.

Calvert is off to Italy and back searching for a pair of paintings that the owner Peter Brocco claims were stolen. When Calvert finds one of them he finds out also it's a fake and the artist who copied it is murdered.

So it's back to Los Angeles and to art dealer Catherine Craig who is involved though Calvert does not know how much.

These Falcon films aren't a patch on the George Sanders/Tom Conway films done at RKO. This one is one dull snooze.

After the Falcon series ran its course with Tom Conway at RKO, the character was taken over for a few films with John Calvert in the role, made on a low budget for the interesting "Film Classics" company, which specialized in indie crime/noir/mystery films for a few years in the late 40s--this was the 2nd of 3 such Falcon entries. It most resembles the later PRC product, but is a step below PRC in the professionalism department, with a mix of veterans and seeming amateurs in the cast, and with a few small cheap sets. The plot revolves around art theft and fraud, and setting is LA and Italy, Italy being represented by a room and a staircase! John Calvert is quite different from Tom Conway as an actor--yes,he is tall and has a thin moustache, and he speaks in an subdued, educated manner, but he isn't the charmer or the wit of Conway's character, and here he is in the employ of an insurance company, where he reports to the hardest-working-man-in-b-movies, Lyle Talbot. There's never really any doubt about who does what to whom, but the various characters are all attempting to fool other characters as to their true identity and motives, so the "mystery" is how long that will keep up... as well as whether the Falcon will be able to resolve the art fraud situation. I've watched this film twice in the last year, and it's a decent late 40s low-budget mystery that's as good as the average 45-47 PRC film or late 40s/early 50s Eagle-Lion/Lippert output. Like a good little-known detective novel that you stumble across from the 40s or 50s, this film does what it needs to do and no doubt satisfied its audience in its day. Director Jack Bernhard--who made the amazing Decoy and the almost-as- amazing Violence the year before at Monogram--doesn't have the same kind of over-the-top, pulpy material to work with here, but no doubt could work efficiently in the vein of a William Berke or a Sam Newfield. Don't expect another Decoy here. Anyone who is seriously into low-budget post-WWII detective movies enough to even know what this film is will probably want to see it.

This is the 15th of the 16 Falcon films, and the second starring John Calvert as the Falcon. There are no witty lines in this film at all, which is entirely without humour, and it is all played absolutely straight. There is no pet dog, as the rather inadequate dog of the previous film has been dropped without explanation, and Calvert does not try to be 'cute' this time. (In the previous film he did a few magic tricks with things appearing and disappearing in his hands, which were not very good either, and they have been ditched too.) The story is about two stolen paintings by the renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), the intrigues, two murders, and other attempted murders, connected with them. Are they fakes? Are they real? Some of the characters believe one thing and some believe the other. No less than two corpses are left lying while the characters go off and do other things. In one case, the Falcon flies to America leaving a dead man lying in a room in Milan. And in the other case, a hotel desk clerk's corpse is left lying behind his desk, entirely forgotten by both the Falcon and the police as they leave the hotel. Evidently, the script writer did not remember that murder victims cannot be disposed of simply by turning a page in the script, but require people to collect and bury their bodies. This is another extremely low budget effort, and an undistinguished one. Calvert has the annoying habit of grinning most of the time, for no particular reason. Either he was sternly lectured as a child to 'smile, Jonnny, smile', or some acting coach told him he must lighten up, so that he thought contorting his face in inappropriate grins was the way to do it. You know how some dogs attempt to imitate the smiles of their owners, well Calvert is like a dog who does that. As for this film, undemanding fans of old mystery films will find it interesting for the complexities of the story.