“Ever see a cop who wasn’t sure…?”
It’s no mystery, (pun intended), that I love a good crime story and John Sturges’ Mystery Street is an unexpected pleasure.
Sturges is better remembered for A-list classics such as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and personal favourite Bad Day At Black Rock, but this is much more modest affair, yet just as compelling and a definite forerunner of today’s popular forensic crime dramas, like CSI, Silent Witness and the like.
Good-time girl Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling) hooks up with hapless Henry Stanway (Daktari’s Marshall Thompson) as he drinks to forget his wife’s miscarriage.
Desperate to meet up with a mysterious man but with no way to reach him, she “commandeers” Henry’s car, dumping him along the way… but her clandestine meeting ends with her being murdered by the stranger.
Six months later, her skeletal remains wash up on the Cape Cod shore.
With no physical evidence, no obvious witnesses and nothing to confirm the victim’s identity, Police Lieutenant Pete Moralas (Fantasy Island’s Ricardo Montalban) enlists the help of pioneering Harvard forensic scientist Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) to investigate, using a combination of modern technology, deduction and plain old legwork. Things are further complicated by Vivian’s deliciously batty landlady Mrs Smerrling (a scene-stealing Elsa Lanchester) blackmailing the killer and a nervous Stanway lying to the police, denying he ever met Vivian to spare his wife’s feelings and ending up as the prime suspect.
Will justice be served? The answers are there in black and white…
Although Mystery Street has the looks and trappings of a classic film noir, (sharp suits, women with a past and stylish photography), it really is a police procedural. Protagonist Moralas is far from the standard noir gumshoe as he is idealistic and earnest rather than hard-bitten and cynical- his Hispanic origins, inexperience (it’s his first murder case) and his calm refusal to be provoked by sneering blue-blooded bad guy Harkley (Edmon Ryan) when he references his Latino background make him very different indeed. (You could almost say that his principles and self-questioning make him the, erm, Moralas centre of the film – I suspect that Ricardo Montalban welcomed the chance to play a detective rather than his standard Latin seducer, but as we know, more challenging roles would follow.)
As I mentioned, this film is one of the first to feature police forensics although it predated the Quincy TV show by decades. Instead of the charismatic/ cranky/ quirky pathologists commonplace in modern telly, Bruce Bennett’s Dr McAddoo is pretty much a problem-solving human Google who is only there to answer questions but the detective’s story is first and foremost here. The wonders of crime-fighting science (and more scientific exposition than the average 50s monster flick) on display here can be remarkably disturbing for the time – the juxtaposition of glamorous missing girls superimposed over a still of the murder victim’s skull are quite chilling.
Similarly unsettling is the scene where Vivian’s killer passionately kisses her dead body to make her appear alive when bystanders drive past- ewww!
The dialogue may not be full of terse, Chandler-esque zingers, but the film looks gorgeous, beautifully shot and culminating in a tense chase on foot through railway sidings. Performances are generally solid, but the standout character is Elsa Lanchester’s eccentric, greedy and monstrous landlady blackmailer Mrs Smerrling, powered by gin, greed and venal curiosity. She steals absolutely every scene she appears in, God bless the evil, blackmailing cow!
You can clearly see director John Sturges’ talent for storytelling here, a potential which, for once, was realised Although this should technically be called Mystery Beach (!), it is a solid tale well told and is well worth a watch.
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