Mystery Street (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 14) I watched an intriguing 1950 MGM production called Mystery Street, a film gris largely shot on location in Boston, Massachusetts and starring Ricardo Montalban (the first time he’d ever got top billing in an American film) as Dan Morales (or, as the credits oddly spell it, “Moralas”), a Latino detective with the district attorney’s office of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which is where Boston is located. He gets involved in a murder investigation when a birdwatcher (Walker Burke) finds a skeleton on the beach at Cape Cod (and for all the ballyhoo about this film having been shot on location in Massachusetts, the scene on the beach is obviously a studio “exterior” with a projected backdrop of sky and a beach surface sculpted from sand and artificial plants). Mystery Street was directed by John Sturges, written by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks from a story by Leonard Spigelgass, and photographed by the great John Alton. It opens with a great scene that’s the stuff of real film noir: a woman named Vivian Helton (played by the great Jan Sterling, who’s just as good here as she’d be a year later in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole except she gets killed in the first reel), who works as a B-girl at a lowlife bar called the Grass Skirt, is shown making a series of increasingly frantic and desperate phone calls to the rich man she’s been dating and with whom she’s been having an extra-relational affair. The implication is he’s got her pregnant and she’s expecting him to pony up to get her an illegal abortion, though this isn’t that clear in the film itself (nor could it have been with the Production Code and its Jesuit enforcers in full power over American filmmaking). Vivian gets in a yellow Ford driven by Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), a rather hapless young married man who’s lonely because his wife just lost their first child to a miscarriage and she hasn’t been released from the hospital yet.

Vivian takes the wheel of the car and commandeers it to go to the home of her married lover, shipbuilder James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), in Cape Cod. When Henry demands that she stop the car so he can take over the wheel and drive back to Boston to see his wife in the hospital, Vivian abandons him in front of an out-of-the-way beachfront diner called “The Dunes” and then she’s met by an unseen assailant whom she argues with, and who pulls out a gun and shoots her. Then he takes her body (surprisingly light given how heavy a dead human body can be) and buries her in the sand, where she rests for four months until she becomes skeletal as her flesh and muscles rot away. Enter Dan Morales/Moralas and his associate, Harvard University medical law professor Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), who has the intriguing and then-novel task of figuring out who she was from a bunch of bones and therefore getting a lead as to who might have killed her. From the condition of her bones Morales and McAdoo are able to deduce that she was a woman, between 20 and 24 years of age, that she worked as a toe dancer (from the development of her foot bones) and she was killed with a gun (from the cracked rib where the fatal bullet entered her body). Ultimately they’re able to identify her by taking photos of missing young women – Vivian was reported missing by her roommate, Jackie Elcott (Betsy Blair in her feature-film debut) – printing them on clear slide film and superimposing them over an image of the dead girl’s skull. From then on it’s only a matter of police legwork to trace Vivian’s whereabouts and learn that Henry Shanway is the last known person to see her alive. Morales has the unenviable task of “outing” Shanway to his wife Grace (Sally Forrest, second-billed) as having been out with another woman while she was in hospital recovering from a miscarriage. Shanway actually is indicted for Vivian’s murder and is about to be tried for the crime when Morales has his doubts; he’s found Harkley’s phone number.

Harkley had served in World War II and not turned in his gun after he was discharged, but he no longer has the gun because it’s been stolen by Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester in one of her half-entertaining, half-annoying ditz performances; she did a much better job as an eccentric artist in a film considerably better than this one, John Farrow’s The Big Clock), Vivian’s and Jackie’s landlady. Mrs. Smerrling hoped to blackmail Harkley with the gun, but he strangles her instead in the living room of her boarding house, then steals the baggage claim check for the rail-station locker where she stashed the gun. Fortunately Morales and McAdoo are able through independent evidence to deduce the location of the locker, and the surviving parties converge on the train station and Harkley is duly arrested. Mystery Street is a quite good movie – I’d seen it before but I liked it better this time around – even though it’s perched quite uncertainly between police procedural and film noir. I liked the scene in which Mrs. Smerrling is being questioned by the cops and among the questions she’s asked is, “Are you married?,” to which she replies, “Sort of.” (Reflecting Elsa Lanchester’s real-life marriage to Charles Laughton, I joked that she could have said, “Well, I was technically married to a famous actor, but he wouldn’t have sex with me because he was Gay.”) I also liked Ricardo Montalban even though it was never quite clear which Latino ethnicity he was supposed to be from; there was a brief mention that hinted he was actually from the Portuguese fishing community in Boston, which may have been why the credits spelled his last name “Moralas” instead of “Morales.” And there was a great scene, timely today, in which Harkley boasts about how generations of his family had lived in Massachusetts well before there was a United States and makes a rather snippy comment about how much he resents being interrogated by a police officer who isn’t a blue-blooded white American. Overall, though, Mystery Street is the sort of movie I call film gris (“grey movie”) because it attempts film noir but doesn’t quite achieve it – except in John Alton’s stunning visuals, especially in the scenes taking place in the city at night, where we’re in true film noir territory both thematically and visually.