THE APPOINTMENT (1969)

A single lawyer nearing middle age (Omar Sharif, at right) gets dressed one morning and, looking in the mirror, thinks that he's looking more and more like his father as he ages, referring to seeing "the black nostrils of death" on his face. Driving through Rome, he is caught in a traffic jam and winds up captivated by a woman he sees walking down the street. Later, at lunch with an old friend and fellow lawyer (Fausto Tozzi), Sharif discovers that the woman (Anouk Aimee) is a high-class model and the fiancée of Tozzi. Some time later, Tozzi tells Sharif that he found out that Aimee is also a high-class call girl, or so he suspects when a friend shows Tozzi a pin he took from a hooker that is identical to a pin that Tozzi gave Aimee and she has since said she lost. Tozzi dumps her, which leads Sharif to begin dating her. Without telling her about his suspicions about her, he investigates her, going so far as to contact an infamous high-class madam (Lotte Lenya) who sets him up with someone he suspects is Aimee. Sharif and Aimee go off for a romantic weekend in Sardinia but she refuses to have sex so he leaves in a huff. He eventually is called by Lenya for an appointment with the whore he thinks is Aimee, but she never shows up. After Aimee tries to kill herself, she and Sharif reconcile and get married, and they're happy for maybe five minutes until Tozzi replants the seed of suspicion in Sharif. Sharif sets up another appointment through Lenya, and the consequences are a bit unexpected and tragic.

This may have been a well-shot movie (the director is old pro Sidney Lumet) but the print I saw on TCM was ugly, with murky browns and yellows predominating. That might have been intentional, but I suspect this forgotten movie could stand a restoration. But will anyone want to watch it? The score is lush and the melodrama is old-fashioned, though the explicitness of Sharif's suspicions are only possible due to the end of the production code. In addition to a drab look, the acting is similarly drab. The two main supporting actors, Lenya and Tozzi, are fine, but Sharif and Aimee seem to alternate between low-energy and overacting, and it's difficult to care about the tensions that attract and repel these two. At the very end, when you think that the issue of Aimee's occupation will be left up in the air, there is a twist that does answer the question and I did appreciate that, but I was still left with the unlikability of both Sharif and Aimee. [TCM]