Mystery Street

Mystery Street, which was part of a double-bill on the Act of Violence DVD, is a decent murder mystery from 1950, an early film by director John Sturges, who would go to make great films like Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape. It was also, some claim, the first movie to be filmed on location in Boston, and plays today like an episode of CSI: Boston.

The film is also notable for having the lead, a police detective from Barnstable, Massachusetts, played by a Hispanic, Ricardo Montalban. Not much is made of it, except for a pointed comment late in the film. I admire the script's forward-thinking on that point.

Though filmed with noir techniques, Mystery Street is a police procedural and an advertisement for Harvard University. In the beginning we are shown a young woman (Jan Sterling) who plies her trade in a bar. She is constantly calling someone in Hyannis. She meets a poor drunken sap in the bar and manages to get him into his car. She drives out to the Cape, ditches the sap, and ends up getting shot by someone whom we only see in shadows. The sap reports his car missing, but leaves out the details of the girl to his insurance company and to his wife.

Months later the girl's bones turn up on the shore. Montalban is approached by a forensics unit operating out of the Harvard medical school. They show him their techniques for determining her identity. Once they have that, Montalban tracks down all the suspects. The poor sap who lost his car ends up as the suspect, and is about ready to hang for it until some more clues turn up.

Mystery Street is a fine, old-fashioned whodunit, with some nice supporting character roles, most notably by Elsa Lanchester as Sterling's dotty landlady, who thinks she can make some cash by blackmailing the killer. I liked that Montablan, who is presented as a stalwart, fair-minded cop, makes a mistake by believing the sap did it. While not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, it's a perfect movie for a rainy afternoon.