Goodbye, My Fancy (Warner], a slick adaptation of the 1948 Broadway hit comedy, gives Joan Crawford a chance to preen her plumage and practice her intellect as a glamorous Congresswoman who would sooner compromise a man than an issue.
The script takes Congresswoman Crawford back to Good Hope College, to accept an honorary degree and renew her friendship with a professor (Robert Young), now the college president, whom she shielded 20 years before when she was expelled from college for staying out all night with him. She is pursued by a LIFE photographer (Frank Lovejoy), who wants to renew the romance they began when she was a glamorous war correspondent.
President Young seems about to win the Congresswoman's vote when she learns that he is truckling to a stuffy trustee (Howard St. John) who wants to suppress a controversial documentary film she has brought to the campus. After threatening to expose their 20-year-old escapade, Joan finally gets the film shown.
Actress Crawford rides her vehicle regally, though it moves too slowly now & then, and a good cast (including Eve Arden as the Congresswoman's flip secretary) trails along, tossing garlands of Playwright Fay Kanin's bright dialogue and remnants of her original message. On Broadway, the heroine's controversial documentary was an antiwar film. In the Hollywood version, she sponsors a movie preaching academic freedom. As the scripters handle it, this glib switch—no doubt an expedient one—leaves the issue so vaguely generalized that, for all the picture's righteous pounding, it rings pretty hollow.
Appointment with Danger (Paramount) is the same rendezvous Alan Ladd has been keeping for years as a stoic man of action whose natural habitat is a daydream by Walter Mitty. But this time tight plotting, realistic backgrounds and good casting take much of the curse off the part of the synthetic tough guy who has made dangerous living into a comfortable livelihood for Actor Ladd.
After numerous Hollywood tributes to G-men and T-men, the movie is also the first to glorify the federal sleuths of the Post Office Inspection Service (who now. presumably qualify for abbreviation as P-men). When a post-office inspector is murdered, Inspector Ladd gets the job of running down the killers. He finds his suspects planning a foolproof $1,000,000 postal robbery, joins the gang's conspiracy in the guise of a bribe-hungry cop. Ladd's risky masquerade finally lands him in a mess that only fists, bullets and fast footwork can straighten out, but not before the picture works its familiar story into well-tied knots of suspense.
The movie's authentic toughness is supplied by its gangsters, notably Paul Stewart, playing a shrewd, efficient planner, and Jack Webb as an itchy-fingered gunman. The settings look at least as hard as the hoodlums: littered alleys, poolrooms, shabby hotels and stretches of industrial wasteland filmed on location in Gary, Ind., South Chicago and Los Angeles.