MYSTERY STREET (1950)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 93m 13s

An early example of a purposefully scientific exercise in police procedure long before such material was commonplace, MYSTERY STREET stands as a foundational forensic film noir. A crime thriller that predates the CSI era by 50 years, the story's brutal crime scene is explained only through meticulous technical study of evidence, with a university intellectual in partnership with a lawman who otherwise would be in way over his head. Especially in light of the narrative's resolution, the day of the rugged flatfoot solving the serpentine case through sheer persistence was transitioning to his necessary partnership with Ivy League university analytical science.

Like so many proper noir stories, MYSTERY STREET begins in the past, which is to say it is obsessed with the past. A distressed blonde Bostonian B-girl who works at a bar called The Grass Skirt, Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling) senses her elusive significant other wishes to distance himself from her just when she needs him most. Stood up at her place of employment, Vivian instinctively transitions her focus to Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), an obviously vulnerable man who has had a few too many. Vivian takes advantage of the situation and steals his car in the interest of meeting up with her mysterious man on a nearby oceanfront beach. That individual is James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), who promptly puts a bullet through Vivian. After he discards her naked body on the Cape Cod dunes, her skeletal remains are discovered three months later by a local ornithologist (Walter Burke). Portuguese-American Lieutenant Peter Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) from the Boston Detective Bureau finds himself assigned to his first murder case. Inexperienced in such matters but obviously determined, Moralas begins his rather cryptic assignment with only a human skeleton and a lengthy list of missing females for reference. The parameters of the investigation are narrowed by Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), a forensic criminologist at Harvard Medical School, where cases that are seldom what they seem get solved. Through measured scientific analysis and efficient law enforcement protocol, Vivian's remains are identified correctly. Chillingly, it is also determined she was pregnant.

Steeped in fatalism, the noir film emphasizes the structural power of the past

The doomed B-girl Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling)

A birdwatcher makes a grotesque discovery

This shot recalls cinematographer John Alton's work in
HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948), when Richard Basehart's
character disappears into a massive storm sewer system

The healthy compendium of noir themes and motifs is structured around the classic noir "wrong man" concept that had gathered plenty of steam in the mid-to-late 1940s. Such narratives examine the considerable downstream effects of either poor choices or bad luck, sometimes a little of each. Film noir permutations with "wrong man" relevance include genre staples such as PHANTOM LADY (1944), THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944), BLACK ANGEL (1946), THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946), CROSSFIRE (1947), DARK PASSAGE (1947), DESPERATE (1947), HIGH WALL (1947) and THE BIG CLOCK (1948). The "wrong man" premise often comes shackled to an unreservedly conservative viewpoint, and that theme applies here. After the beleaguered Mr. Shanway complains about his perpetual bad luck ("I'm always where I shouldn't be."), he instantly is targeted by an opportunistic Vivian. And in the grandest of film noir traditions, it seems he must be fated to become entangled with this troubled woman. Had he been with his wife like any honorable man should have been, it is implied, he never would have become linked to Vivian's murder case. His wounds are, at least in part, self-inflicted.

Embroidered within MYSTERY STREET's tightly woven storyline is an unmistakably anti-elitist slant. Much of this ideological mood is communicated through Harkley, a yacht designer who personifies the inequalities commonly attached to capitalism. The charmless manner of the arrogant aristocrat emerges upon his introduction, when the socially prominent man coldly eliminates his lover, a woman of far lower social stature. His family business established in 1832, Harkley is a scion of generational wealth and privilege. His class-based sense of superiority is made manifest when Lieutenant Moralas drops by Harkley's office. Under the xenophobic assumption Moralas must be inferior based upon his noticeable accent, Harkley calls attention to his own family's supposedly superior bloodline:  "There was a Harkley around these parts long before there was a U.S.A....but from the way you talk, you haven't been around here long." Rather than leave it at that, Harkley continues, "You know I'm used to respect. People looking up to me." Of course a central idea upon which the United States was built is that each citizen should be treated the same by law. The smug Harkley does not appear to harbor any appreciation for rule of law. He believes in special treatment for elite individuals, that his family heritage sets him apart from other Americans, including the cop investigating him. In truth Harkley is far less an American than the Portuguese-American Moralas.

Re-animated

A sensational headline for any era

The wrong man

John Sturges and John Alton team up for some great minimalist setups, like this one

A routine criticism often wielded at the film noir is that women do not get much in the way of positive representation. With that assumption in mind, let's take an analytical glance at Vivian Heldon. Two weeks behind on her rent, the 24-year-old Vivian is a streetwise B-girl doing her darndest to look out for her impregnated self. That she has resorted to prostitution is not exactly a murky subtext; it is revealed there are 86 mostly male names in her little black book. Ultimately her demand for hush money gets her silenced. In fact she and her unborn child are reduced in social status to about the lowest level imaginable:  skeletal remains in need of identification. Just after Vivian's murder, her lover-turned-killer embraces her lifeless body in an upright position to convey the impression of moonlight romance before a bypassing vehicle. This macabre moment of death imitating life has its correlation to a long list of noir films that generate a "walking dead" theme. In dead-man-walking noir, as I call it, major characters roam toward doom, sometimes already dead or as if already dead, in variants such as DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET (1944), DETOUR (1945), SCARLET STREET (1945), THE DARK CORNER (1946), DECOY (1946), THE KILLERS (1946), OUT OF THE PAST (1947), RIDE THE PINK HORSE (1947), ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948), ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), D.O.A. (1950), GUN CRAZY (1950), NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) and TOUCH OF EVIL (1958). A similarly morbid connection with Vivian involves a mortician (Willard Waterman) who describes an obviously intimate encounter with her in one of his trade vehicles! The much-utilized "walking dead" noir theme gets a jolting twist in MYSTERY STREET with Vivian in essence restored to life via forensic science, which is to say she must rise back to life for her killer to face justice. Vivian's landlady Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester) intimates the presence of Vivian in front of Harkley when she tells him, "Perhaps she's listening to us right now." Smerrling suggests Vivian is still around, or perhaps in some realm between life and death. Though defeated by evil masculine authority, Vivian's pseudo-reincarnation suggests stubborn feminine resourcefulness that should not be taken lightly. Far less appealing than Vivian, Smerrling is the sort of busybody woman nobody likes. She is an eavesdropper, a blackmailer, an alcoholic. Thanks to her self-serving behavior, the hapless Henry Shanway faces a murder charge. Little wonder she is single. But in spite of some pretty undesirable qualities, she is no fool. Smerrling outsmarts the villain on his own turf, though she does pay dearly for it later.

In close conjunction with female noir archetypes is the inference that within noir atmospherics traditional family values are under severe duress. The strained or absent family often serves as one of the crucial dynamics of film noir narrative framework. Notice how the seductive barstool alure of Vivian throws a stick in the spokes of the Shanways, a family already faced with unfair difficulties. Suddenly Henry's wife Grace Shanway (Sally Forrest) must review the character of her husband while recovering mentally and physically from a miscarriage. Though ultimately her husband's reputation is restored, their future in terms of family development remains in question:  women who have experienced a miscarriage are at a slightly higher risk to endure another. In a fascinating parallel in terms of noir family dynamics, it is disclosed Vivian was with child when murdered. Naturally Vivian never had a chance with the elite boat designer Harkley, a married man with three daughters, not that his family will be very well preserved. Harkley's girls are destined to see their father only during appropriate visiting times. His last ship has sailed.

The energetic and very diligent cop Peter Moralas (Ricardo Montalban)

Prison bar blues

Visual entrapment of a killer

Moralas closes in on the worthless aristocrat in a decidedly
blue collar environment:  a railroad car

In terms of scope, ambition and scale, MYSTERY STREET ventures beyond other genre films of its era, but it did not succeed commercially at the time of its original theatrical run. According to The Eddie Mannix Ledger, a reference for budgets and box office receipts for MGM films produced between 1924 and 1962, the groundbreaking forensic film noir earned $429,000 domestically and $346,000 in international box office totals, which was not enough to label it a moneymaker for MGM. Deservedly, its reputation has grown to cult film status over the years, with most critics and noir fans in alignment on the film's artistic merit. MYSTERY STREET was a product of the Dore Schary phase at MGM, a period of major transition for the studio. Schary joined MGM in 1948 as head of production, working for Louis B. Mayer at the time. In direct opposition to Mayer's costly escapist musicals and glossy melodramas, Schary favored gritty social realism that could be produced with modest funding. Along with MYSTERY STREET, other noteworthy film noirs that emanated from MGM under Schary's leadership included BORDER INCIDENT (1949), SIDE STREET (1949), TENSION (1949), THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and CAUSE FOR ALARM! (1951). MYSTERY STREET's semi-documentary approach to police procedure can be traced back to HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948) and THE NAKED CITY (1948).

Director John Sturges is not remembered for his work in film noir, though he did helm THE SIGN OF THE RAM (1948) and JEOPARDY (1953). He would become far better recognized for his work in meaningful Westerns and action/adventure titles such as BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955), GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957), THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1958), LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL (1959), THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963). Sturges should be credited for bringing a deeply noir sense of indiscriminate mortality to MYSTERY STREET, with the Vivian character reduced to a statistic for study. Few film noirs go down quite this cold; a beautiful woman dies young yet there really is no discernible sentiment of loss. The same minimalist sense of compassion is apparent when Mrs. Smerrling gets clunked over the head. The caged bird chirping afterward is a telling touch; no doubt animals have more respect for life than humans. The screenplay credited to Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks was based upon an unpublished story by Leonard Spigelgass, who earned an Oscar nomination for "Best Writing, Motion Picture Story" at the 1951 Academy Awards. His story was based at least in part on the unsolved case of Irene Perry, whose body was discovered in the summer of 1940 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. A Harvard Medical School team determined Perry was strangled to death. Fetal bones were present in her abdominal cavity.

Famed cinematographer John Alton brings credibility to any production, though his presence behind the cameras that covered MYSTERY STREET is less obvious than in his more expressionistic work for which he has been memorialized by film noir followers. T-MEN (1947), HOLLOW TRIUMPH (1948), RAW DEAL (1948), BORDER INCIDENT and THE CROOKED WAY (1949) all are characterized visually by dramatic interplay between darkness and light, with a frequent tendency toward oblique camera angles designed to comment on the action. In MYSTERY STREET, Alton leans into more realistic lighting schematics and camera setups, not to suggest his work here is necessarily less expressive or artistic, just less stylized than his previous work that tends to define his Hollywood career. Beacon Hill, Cape Cod, Hyannis, Harvard Medical School and Trinity Station were among the Massachusetts filming locations selected to convey an East Coast sense of verisimilitude.

Leading man Ricardo Montalban is well known to Gen Xers like me for his iconic work in the TV series FANTASY ISLAND (1977–1984) as well as memorable supporting work in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) and THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988). Before MYSTERY STREET, he appeared in the memorably gritty film noir BORDER INCIDENT, which I recommend highly. Just after MYSTERY STREET he was effective in the boxing drama RIGHT CROSS (1950, also directed by Sturges). Sadly, Montalban's life took a turn for the worse during the filming of ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI (1951). He was thrown from his horse and trampled by another horse, which left him with a permanent spine injury. Despite the chronic pain he tolerated for the remainder of his life, he continued to work on television and movie productions with an emphasis on voice work in the last stage of his incredible career. Bruce Bennett, well known to film noir fans for his supporting role in MILDRED PIERCE (1945), is well cast as Harvard medical examiner Dr. McAdoo, the calm voice of reason who employs toxicology, forensic anthropology and spectrographic reporting to steer the police investigation led by Moralas in the appropriate direction (the film concludes with a direct reminder that Harvard ingenuity makes the arrest of dangerous criminals possible). And I always have loved Jan Sterling, a talented film noir veteran who appeared in APPOINTMENT WITH DANGER (1950), CAGED (1950), UNION STATION (1950) and the Billy Wilder genre classic ACE IN THE HOLE (1951). From an appearance standpoint, Sterling had that rare ability to look ordinary and super-hot at the same time.

With gratitude to Warner Archive, we now have a dual-layered Blu-ray interpretation of MYSTERY STREET that film noir aficionados are advised to add to their collections. Framed at the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.37:1, this new presentation contains more information on the left and right sides of the frame, along with markedly improved clarity compared to standard definition. Supplemental material begins with the audio commentary track by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward that was ported from the Warner DVD version issued in 2007 as part of the Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4 box set. The commentary flow is informative though sometimes grinds to an occasional halt. With the film audio muted for the duration of the commentary, those moments of silence ring particularly empty. Most of the noteworthy bullet points are voiced by Silver, who observes MGM was a little late to the docunoir subgenre established in earnest by Universal Pictures with the release of THE NAKED CITY. There is a palpable irony in the uneven police work of Moralas, who is unable to find any proof of wrongdoing in his thorough search of Harkley's office. Mrs. Smerrling proves herself more adept at uncovering incriminating evidence during her visit. Silver also calls attention to the career of Betsy Blair, who plays Jackie Elcott, the most durable female character in that she is comfortable around guns. Blair was blacklisted for four years in response to her activism for women's rights. Her husband at the time Gene Kelly was able to leverage her out of professional exile.

Another bonus item culled from the 2007 DVD is the brief featurette "MYSTERY STREET: Murder at Harvard" (4m 54s), which includes archival footage with John Alton and the assertion that MYSTERY STREET was the first fiction film shot in Boston during Hollywood's Golden Age. Rounding out this Blu-ray release are two Tom and Jerry animated shorts from 1950:  "Little Quacker" (7m 11s) and "Tom and Jerry in the Hollywood Bowl" (7m 26s). The theatrical trailer (2m 24s) includes a shoutout to Harvard from actor Marshall Thompson.