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Pretty Good

Fresh and Exciting

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

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.

It zips along quickly, like most B productions, with little wasted motion and no time spent on incidental events or reality intrusions. It's a British crime thriller starring Esmond Knight and Lilli Palmer and was made in 1935, about the time Hitchcock was hitting his stride in the same arena.You can't help wondering, as this thing rolls along in its complicated but uninspired way, like any cheap second feature starring Boston Blackie or Charlie Chan, what Hitchcock would have done with it. There's even a scene shot in an illegal casino in which one of the villains is eating a meal. And that's it. He just eats. All the scenes show about as much interest on the part of the participants as this one, as exciting as watching a barnacle clinging to a rock.Lilli Palmer plays a slightly tarnished moll who falls for the hero and turns good. She's recognizable to those familiar with her later films only because her voice is the same. It's really strange. She was 21 when this was released and quite pretty. Ten or fifteen years later she was beautiful. Did she get a nose job, or what? Unless you have a taste for old-fashioned crime films with the undercover Scotland Yard agent finally trapping the cackling villain -- "Of course, you think I'm mad. I prefer to call it genius." -- you might better think about spending your time doing something other than this absolutely formulaic B film.

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.