Mystery Street (1950)

Load of rubbish!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The blackmail scam has been done ad nauseam but not quite like actress Jan Sterling who plays Vivian Heldon the sexpot who seemed to have too many dates until her last scheme went sideways on her. She ends up as the murder victim. The poor sap who was last seen with Vivian (the victim) alive was Henry Shanway (played by Marshall Thompson) who just happened to be at the wrong place, and at the wrong time. Henry happened to be seen in the company of the murder victim Vivian Heldon leaving a bar. Vivian was reported missing six months earlier by another boarder who resided in the same rooming house where Vivian was known to use the landlord's downstair hallway phone regularly to call her male companions.As this film was released in 1950 I was more than impressed with the manner in which the lead detective Peter Moralas (played by a young looking Ricardo Montalban) teamed up with Harvard University doctor/scientist named Dr. McAdoo (played by Bruce Bennett. We are witness to one of the first times that the use of forensic science is used in the murder investigation process within a film.In 1950, this new forensic procedure(s) must have been quite impressive to the general movie audience witnessing it for the very first time. The new police investigative procedures used must have also been even more scarier for any yet to be discovered and unknown murderers. Murderers who had yet to be captured in 1950 were most likely perspiring quite heavily after watching how the detective and scientist had teamed up and meticulously gathered scientific evidence. Their evidence was used to determine who the murdered person was, whose bones were discovered buried in the sand by the evening tide after washing ashore, how she had died exactly, and by what type of weapon.I also liked that unlike many of the crime TV series of the era and that have been released over the past five (5) decades, in this film, the lead detective Peter Moralas who was eager to make an arrest based on the existing evidence leads to an innocent man being arrested and tried for the murder. The film has excellent depth and the audience can see how Detective Moralas may have prematurely come to his conclusion on the murderer but both his conscience and his most qualified medical/scientist Dr. McAdoo convince him to keep digging just in case someone else is guilty and is covering up who the actual murderer may be. The film is a very good crime/drama/mystery with good acting and an intriguing plot filled with sex, greed, suspicion, blackmail, assault, and of course the earliest signs of how forensic science has assisted in determining the W5, who, what, why, when and where of a murder victim.This is a movie well worth seeing.

I can really appreciate a film I've never heard of when it delivers an intriguing story with compelling characters. Elsa Lanchester is positively off the rails here as a scheming, money obsessed landlady who has the temerity to attempt blackmail on a guy who's already killed someone, and she knows it! How she couldn't figure out that he might try to kill her just as handily kind of escapes me, but I guess she only saw the dollar signs. Funny, but I had the same impression of the pharmacist in "The Two Mrs. Carroll's" when he tried to put the screws to Humphrey Bogart. Not a smart move.If you didn't know who Detective Moralas was starting out, his familiar appearance might have driven you crazy while the story progressed. This is probably the earliest film I've seen Ricardo Montalban in and he did a nice job here as the Boston homicide cop. If nothing else, the story line reveals the excruciating detail that forensic investigation requires to catch a murderer. I don't really watch TV shows like CSI so maybe I'm not in tune to modern police methods much, but for an early story dealing with the science, it took one through a lot of twists and turns to find the killer.There was one remarkable element in the story that I got a bit of a chuckle out of having nothing to do with the movie per se, but with Mrs. Shanway's (Sally Forrest) stay at the hospital when she had the miscarriage. One of the receipts she produced for Moralas was a forty eight dollar hospital bill. I was born the same year this film came out, and believe it or not, my mother saved the hospital bill as well. Lest you think the amount they came up with here was made up for the movie, I can confirm that my own delivery was a bargain at sixty dollars!

Heavy spoiler alert. Montalban plays rural police detective who moves downtown to Beantown and finds himself enmeshed in strange murder where only the victim's skeleton remains. With the medical assistance of Bennett, Montalban eventually works his way through to the killer. I would guess this qualifies as sort of light film noir, in sophisticated fashion the movie meanders through other suspects before the real killer emerges. Montalban really was a quietly effective gem of an artist with true screen presence. He went strong from this until nearly 40 years later in the first Naked Gun, and then another ten years beyond that (while looking buff in Star Trek II along the way). Nice tight movie.

Ricardo Montalban, Jan Sterling, and Elsa Lanchester all reside on "Mystery Street." Jan Sterling has a small but pivotal role in this exciting crime drama. The best films in film noir make the movie's style the star over all actors, and this is one such example. Ricardo is very memorable and sexy, and Elsa has a scene-stealing role as a landlady, but this centers on the investigation of a murder and is compelling all the way. In fact, it plays like a forensic show on TV today, with Bruce Bennett studying the skeletal remains of the victim. Sounds a little creepy and unsettling, doesn't it? Well, it's very matter of fact about the every-day life of Ricardo and what he does as a cop. Each person he meets is an individual, but to him it's just another day and another case on "Mystery Street."