Mystery Street (1950)

Directed by John Sturges; produced by Frank E Taylor

A dance-hall girl (Jan Sterling) is having bad luck with men, and her luck gets worse when she insists on seeing her latest boyfriend. The implication is blackmail, but she is the one who pays. He kills her, buries her body and sinks in a pond the car she stole. Months later, her remains are found and the investigation begins. Not only must the cop (Ricardo Montalban) on the case find out how the victim died, but who she was. This starts a tortuous process that leads the police – and their suspects – down a crooked path.

The title suggests a light-hearted whodunit with an amateur sleuth, perhaps a married couple exchanging witticisms as they investigate, à la Nick and Nora Charles. Instead, Mystery Street is an unsentimental, realistic police procedural with a touch of film noir. The writing credits are impressive: Richard Brooks (Key Largo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) collaborates with Sydney Boehm (When Worlds Collide, Union Station) to create a strong screenplay that says as much without words as with them.

Of note is the use and detailed descriptions of forensic anthropology, possibly the first of its kind in movies. A Harvard University professor (Bruce Bennett) is key in helping solve the case. It was interesting for me to note how similar his explanations are to those used by literary character Gideon Oliver (another forensic anthropologist) in books written three and four decades later. The expostulations are matched by the expectations that the audience is smart enough to follow them.

At first, the murderer’s identity is hidden, but when continued obscurity does not have serve the story and is wisely discarded, it’s clear that the killer’s face went unseen only for atmosphere. The mystery is not, then, ‘whodunit’, but how the police will prove it.

The characters are memorable. Montalban’s detective is strong and far removed from stereotyped Latin policemen, though he is not flawless. Eager in his first homicide case, he is first skeptical, then reliant, upon medical science, and is too single-minded in his pursuit of his initial suspect. (His character’s antecedents are, for a viewer who likes accurate detail, a bit puzzling: attached to the Barnstable (County) District Attorney’s Office – which accounts for his immediate involvement in the case – he later states that he worked primarily in the ‘Portuguese district’ (of Boston). At one point, he describes himself as a ‘stranger’ at Harvard, though his colleague, definitely a Bostonian, admits that he is lost at the university, too: ‘not my part of Boston.’ It’s assumed, therefore, that Montalban had left the city for the better prospects of Cape Cod.)

The victim’s busybody landlady is likewise well-written, though nowhere near as sympathetic; the Harvard doctor is suitably intelligent; the principal suspect (Marshall Thompson) realistically foolish. More minor characters have reasons for their inclusion.

John Sturges is credited with directing Bad Day at Black Rock and The Great Escape, among other movies. The direction appears ordinary yet creates a suspenseful, involving atmosphere; like a musical score, one doesn’t realise how skilled it is and how it contributes to a scene, until it is finished. The setting of the movie in Massachusetts, and the location filming in Boston and at the seaside, are refreshing in a time when crime movies, if not filmed on a sound-stage, were placed either in New York or Los Angeles.

As for the acting, it is top-notch. Montalban was very well-known as a leading man, though never in the bigger films. His performances, unfortunately, became quite hammy as time went on, but in the 1940s and ‘50s, they were natural and convincing. The writing of the other characters would not have survived intact if they had not been brought to life by competent players. Elsa Lanchester is infuriatingly conniving as the landlady.

A largely unknown film, Mystery Street is another entertaining B-movie that rises above the image created by the category’s name. Interesting, as well as involving, it benefits very well from the talent that went into it.