Herbert Lom spent years being driven out of his mind by Inspector Clouseau, most gloriously in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Long before Chief Inspector Dreyfus started twitching, though, Lom had already become one of postwar British cinema’s most reliable smooth operators. Kino’s first Brit Noir Collection gathers three films from three directors across eleven years, with Lom lurking somewhere on the shady side of respectable in every one.

Cage of Gold (1950) is the glossy entry, an Ealing melodrama with a thriller humming underneath it. Judith Moray (Jean Simmons, Spartacus) is engaged to dependable doctor Alan Kearn (James Donald, The Great Escape) when her old flame, dashing ex-RAF pilot Bill Glennan (David Farrar, Black Narcissus), comes swaggering back into her life. She quickly learns just how expensive charm can be. Director Basil Dearden (The Blue Lamp) carries the story from London to the nightclubs of Paris, where Lom eventually enters the picture, while Douglas Slocombe’s photography gives even the Tube a touch of elegance. Keep an eye out for Bernard Lee, more than a decade before he became Bond’s M.

Two years later, The Ringer puts Lom front and center as Maurice Meister, a crooked solicitor who discovers that someone even more dangerous has him in his sights. A vengeful master of disguise is coming for him, Scotland Yard has effectively sealed Meister inside his own home, and the fun comes from wondering which face belongs to the man everyone is waiting for.

Its Edgar Wallace stage roots are impossible to miss, but first-time feature director Guy Hamilton keeps the traffic moving through those rooms with plenty of snap. William Hartnell, years before Doctor Who, nearly walks away with the picture as a Cockney ex-burglar. Hamilton, of course, would eventually graduate to Bond with Goldfinger and much later take on Hercule Poirot in Evil Under the Sun.

Then The Frightened City (1961) arrives and suddenly the collection feels meaner, tougher and several years more modern. Lom plays Waldo Zhernikov, an accountant with a very corporate solution to organized crime: combine six West End protection rackets into one efficient syndicate. What could possibly go wrong?

The operation needs muscle, and it finds some in cat burglar Paddy Damion (Sean Connery, Dr. No). Connery is billed third but already has the screen presence to pull the movie toward him whenever he appears. Yvonne Romain (The Curse of the Werewolf) adds heat as club singer Ilona, while director John Lemont gives London a rougher edge filled with brawls, trashed clubs and considerably less drawing-room politeness. Lom does the math, Connery does the collecting, and the West End pays the bill.

Taken together, the three movies offer a neat little tour through more than a decade of British crime cinema. Cage of Gold has Ealing polish, The Ringer keeps one foot planted on the stage, and The Frightened City points toward the harder-edged crime pictures of the ’60s. None qualifies as some forgotten masterpiece that demands immediate rediscovery, but all three are brisk, well cast and smart enough to leave before the welcome wears out.

There’s also a surprisingly entertaining Bond scavenger hunt running through the set: a future M, a future 007 director and finally the future 007 himself. Lom is the connective tissue, sliding from picture to picture with the kind of effortless suspicion that makes you wonder why anyone in these movies ever trusts him.