Appointment with Danger (1950)

I have seen Alan Ladd in several films now, and he has become one of my noir favorites. He can play both sides of the law with an equal amount of cynicism. His role in Appointment with Danger is Al Goddard, a U.S. postal inspector, and he is definitely on the right side of the law, and he is definitely very cynical.

The film opens in a semidocumentary style, with different interior and exterior shots of the largest post office building in the country. Viewers also see postal workers at work. A voice-over narrator explains the working of the post office in general, then points out that postal inspectors are members of the oldest police force in the United States. Appointment with Danger is the story of one postal inspector, and it starts on a rainy summer night in Gary, Indiana.

This narrated opening is a bit bland, I must confess. But once the action starts—with Postal Inspector Harry Gruber already dead in Gary, Indiana, and his body being dumped in an alley in nearby La Porte—the switch in tone is dramatic. The dramatic tension is accentuated because a nun, Sister Augustine, stops at one end of the alley where two men are trying to hide Gruber’s body. She struggles to open her umbrella in the pouring rain. One of the men, George Soderquist, arrives to help her, and she asks him about the man slumped against their car. Soderquist explains that the man is very drunk. But Sister Augustine doesn’t buy the story. She very soon reports the incident to a nearby police officer on a motorcycle, who chases after the fleeing car. Harry Gruber’s body is eventually found in the alley, and Sister Augustine is now a key witness.

Al Goddard is newly arrived in La Porte from Chicago, Illinois. His boss, Maury Ahearn, is a new arrival as well. Goddard’s reputation has preceded him; everyone in La Porte already knows that he is hard and unfeeling. The secretary in the La Porter branch office tells the investigators who arrive with Gruber’s effects that Goddard has ordered “a small boy with mustard” for lunch. When they bring the evidence into Ahearn’s office, Goddard implies that they are not doing their jobs well enough or they would have found the nun, their key witness, by now.

Al Goddard wants to get the job done and that’s all. Maury Ahearn warns him about antagonizing others on the case. Ahearn has to leave town, and on the way to the airport, he and Al Goddard have a conversation about the case and Goddard’s general attitude. Here’s an excerpt:

• Maury Ahearn: “You’ve been chasing hoodlums for so long, you don’t know how to treat ordinary people. Warm up, will ya?

• Al Goddard: “Sure, I’ll fall in love for ya.”

• Maury Ahearn: “I don’t think you could because you don’t know what a love affair is.”

• Al Goddard: “It’s what goes on between a man and a .45 pistol that won’t jam.”

To say that Goddard is all business would be an understatement.

Goddard is efficient and knows what he is doing. He takes a taxi to investigate known locations behind the killing of Harry Gruber, and he arrives by chance at the railway stop in La Porte. He takes the train from La Porte to Fort Wayne Junction. At Fort Wayne Junction, he questions two railway workers, one of whom saw two nuns board a bus. Goddard takes a bus from Fort Wayne Junction to Belle Isle, where he stops in front of a convent, church, and school. There, naturally, he finds Sister Augustine.

(This article about Appointment with Danger contains some spoilers.)

Part of the charm of the Appointment with Danger is Al Goddard’s character transformation: He starts to care about the welfare of Sister Augustine. Their banter back and forth throughout the film is humorous. But Goddard’s gets off to a rocky start with her, just as he manages to do with everyone he meets. When he first meets her and asks about her whereabouts the night of the murder, Goddard makes the usual bad first impression:

• Sister Augustine: “I got off the train to get Sister Paula some medicine. She wasn’t feeling so well.”

• Al Goddard: “Neither was the guy in the alley. He was a dead government agent by the name of Harry Gruber.”

• Sister Augustine: “Oh. Did he have a family?”

• Al Goddard: “What’s the difference, Sister? He’s just as dead either way.”

• Sister Augustine: “Not quite, Mr. Goddard.”

Al Goddard and Maury Ahearn work with a local homicide detective Dave Goodman. They all wonder about the following: Why did two gunsels kill Gruber? Why did they dump his body out of town instead of leaving town, as most murderers do? What is it about La Porte that is keeping the criminals in town? Maybe something to do with the postal service and something that Gruber was investigating? They eventually narrow their search to three individuals: Earl Boettiger, who is the ring leader of a big heist planned for La Porte; Joe Regas, who would have been just as happy to have gotten rid of Sister Augustine from the start; and George Soderquist, who helped Sister Augustine with her umbrella. Al Goddard insinuates himself into the gang to learn their plans, and the chase is on.

Jan Sterling plays Dodie, the femme fatale and the girlfriend of the criminal ringleader and mastermind, Earl Boettiger. But her role of femme fatale is a bit unusual. She isn’t completely loyal to Boettiger. When she overhears Goddard warning the police and his boss about a change in the heist plans, she doesn’t bother to tell Boettiger anything about it. She confronts Goddard after his phone conversation, and she tells him that she won’t rat on Boettiger because he has always treated her well. When Goddard points out that she could be considered an accessory to a crime. She decides to do her civic duty; she reports the crime to a government agent: Goddard! She doesn’t care that he already knows all about it. She tells Goddard that she hopes Boettiger survives and kills him. Then she leaves to start packing, get out of town, and save herself.

Jan Sterling’s character isn’t the only unusual feature of this noir. Now that I have seen several of Alan Ladd’s films noir, many of them are unusual in this respect: He rarely has a romantic lead, unless his costar is Veronica Lake, that is. In Appointment with Danger, the lead opposite Al Goddard is a nun, hardly a romantic prospect. In This Gun for Hire (1941), Veronica Lake plays Ellen Graham, a woman who helps Alan Ladd’s character, Philip Raven, Ladd’s breakout film noir role. But she is not his costar, nor does she play his girlfriend in their first film together (it’s the one exception to the Veronica Lake as Alan Ladd’s costar and romantic lead). Alan Ladd gets fourth billing in This Gun for Hire, but the film launched him to stardom. He does get the girl, that is, any character played by Veronica Lake, at least after This Gun for Hire. In the next two films noir that they starred in together, The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946), the romantic subplot involves their respective characters.

And then there is Chicago Deadline (1949), in which Alan Ladd plays Ed Adams, a newspaper reporter investigating the death of a young woman, Rosita Jean d’Ur, who is found alone in a shabby hotel room. Donna Reed plays Rosita Jean d’Ur, who is already dead at the start of the film. Ed Adams and viewers get to know her only through flashbacks.

There is one detail about Appointment with Danger that does not stand the test of time at all, and that is its portrayal of the nuns. Sister Augustine and Mother Ambrose are portrayed as simple innocents who are horrified by violence and who are protective of children. This part of the film I found hard to swallow, coming as I do from a 2025 perspective. I kept thinking what a farce this portrayal of nuns is, now that we know both nuns and priests have been accused, some even convicted, of abuse against children around the world. In 1950, a nun in a traditional habit was assumed to be a good person, one even with exceptional moral character. But this just kept getting in the way of my enjoying the film as much as I did the first time I saw it many years ago. The fact that I spent some years under the tutelage of nuns has colored my perspective, I admit. But I think many people today would find the portrayal of the nuns as wide-eyed innocents a little tough to take.

April 7, 1950 (United Kingdom), May 9, 1951 (United States), release dates  •  Directed by Lewis Allen  •  Screenplay by Richard L. Breen, Warren Duff  •  Music by Victor Young  •  Edited by Le Roy Stone  •  Cinematography by John F. Seitz

Alan Ladd as Al Goddard  •  Phyllis Calvert as Sister Augustine  •  Paul Stewart as Earl Boettiger  •  Jan Sterling as Dodie  •  Jack Webb as Joe Regas  •  Stacy Harris as Paul Ferrar  •  Harry Morgan as George Soderquist (credited as Henry Morgan)  •  David Wolfe as David Goodman, homicide detective in Gary, Indiana  •  Dan Riss as Maury Ahearn, chief postal inspector  •  Harry Antrim as Postmaster Taylor  •  Geraldine Wall as Mother Ambrose  •  George J. Lewis as Leo Cronin  •  Paul Lees as Gene Gunner

Distributed by Paramount Pictures  •  Produced by Paramount Pictures