Mystery Street (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jun 19, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
John SturgesRelease Date(s)
1950 (May 27, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: C+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Police procedurals and film noir are staples of Hollywood. One deals with the investigation and solution of a crime, the other with morally ambiguous characters, crime, and betrayal. The 1950 docudrama Mystery Street combines the two in a noir with an early screen portrayal of then state-of-science forensics.
Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling) is a small-time bar singer and party girl whose sugar daddy, James Harkley (Edmond Ryan), has been evading her phone calls. The real reason for her increasingly agitated calls isn’t revealed until much later. Harkley is a respected architect from one of Boston’s oldest blue blood families. He also has a wife and children. Frustrated and furious, Vivian drives up to meet him in a secluded area well outside the city. During their confrontation, Hartley kills her, dumps the body, and pushes the car into a deep lake.
Months later, an ornithologist scouting birds on a beach discovers part of a human skeleton in the sand and calls police. Lt. Peter Morales (Ricardo Montalban), a Boston police detective who has never worked a murder investigation, is assigned to the case. Morales can’t discover any clues that would narrow his search. Identifying the victim is difficult because of the lack of anything but bones. So he turns to Harvard Medical School’s forensic scientist Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) for help.
Overlaying photos of various missing women over a photo of the skull, McAdoo concludes the remains are Vivian’s. An innocent man, Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), who was seen with Vivian, is arrested for the crime based on circumstantial evidence. Small bones found later at the site of the skeleton indicate to Dr. McAdoo that Vivian was pregnant. Meanwhile, Vivian’s nosy landlady, Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester), has figured out the murderer’s identity and smugly attempts to blackmail him.
The screenplay by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks follows Morales as he works with McAdoo and does plenty of legwork in order to solve the mystery. The film is a forerunner of many TV cop dramas in which the step-by-step solution of a crime is neatly wrapped up in less than an hour. Director John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) gives the picture a documentary feel. Montalban, in a role considerably different from his typical Latin lover, is convincing as the cop who knows about and seeks the assistance of an academic scientist. There are hints that Morales, as a Portuguese-American, faces racial prejudice, but the point isn’t overly stressed. In Boston at the time, such bigotry would not have been uncommon.
Mystery Street is essentially an ensemble piece. Morales doesn’t make an appearance for the first fifteen minutes and Sally Forrest, as Henry’s wife Grace, is introduced even later. The rest of the cast is filled out with familiar character actors and contract players, among them King Donovan, Frank Overton, Ned Glass, Willard Waterman, Betsy Blair, and Walter Burke.
No one, however, makes the impression that Elsa Lanchester does as the inquisitive landlady. She steals every scene she’s in with wonderful expressions, acerbic quips, quirky movements, and an opportunistic glint in her eyes. The epitome of fussbudget busybody, Mrs. Smerrling shuts off a hall light to save pennies, opens her door to eavesdrop on phone conversations, and pontificates about the morality of her roomers. In a film that largely depends on many men talking about the crime, Lanchester’s character observes, listens, snoops, and puts together the clues that lead her to whodunit. But she doesn’t share her thoughts with the police. There’s money to be made if she goes directly to the murderer.
The major flaw in the film is its timeline. We’re asked to believe Vivian’s body has degraded to a bare skeleton only a few months after she was murdered. This is hardly likely. Perhaps the censors felt that a skeleton would be a less disturbing image than a partially decomposed, naked woman. And perhaps the screenwriters realized that a skeleton might be identifiable if the flesh were still on it.
The cinematography by John Alton alternates between standard scenes set in the world of investigation to a deeply shadowed world of morally corrupt individuals. Often, Alton’s compositions suggest that characters are trapped or imprisoned. The Boston locations give the film an interesting look, since MGM was known for shooting most of its films at the studio. A climactic chase in a railroad yard is especially memorable.
Mystery Street was shot by director of photography John Alton on 35 mm black & white film with spherical lenses, finished photochemically, and presented in the Academy aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The Blu-ray has been sourced from a 4K scan of the best surviving preservation elements. Even though the original camera negative wasn’t or couldn’t be used, clarity is quite good. Blacks are rich and velvety, and the grayscale is pleasing. Details are particularly well delineated in grasses gently blowing on sand dunes, wallpaper patterns, stubble on men’s faces, buildings on a studio street, and items in a lab and in a police station. Alton achieves some striking compositions with interesting angles, deep shadows, and stark uses of light. Many of the scenes rank in look with the best of film noir.
The soundtrack is English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. English SDH subtitles are an available option. Exposition, questioning, scientific explanations, and discussion of the crime dominate the film. Dialogue is clear and distinct. Sound effects include a gun shot, car horn, car engine, and trains in a rail yard. Rudolph G. Kopp is credited as the film’s composer, but music is absent in most of the film. This is detrimental, especially in a film with a good deal of unrelieved dialogue.
Bonus materials on the Blu-ray release from the Warner Archive Collection include the following:
- Audio Commentary by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward
- Murder at Harvard (4:54)
- Little Quacker (7:11)
- Tom and Jerry at the Hollywood Bowl (7:26)
- Theatrical Trailer (2:24)
Commentary – Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, authors of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, notes that Mystery Street is a docudrama featuring John Alton’s “painterly photography.” Alton came from Hungary and wrote the book Painting With Light, which put forth his theories about photographing and lighting motion pictures. Often, Alton will use off-kilter angles to show a character’s emotional imbalance. Alton uses noir lighting with moody shadows when the scene features dark doings. In police procedural scenes, shadows are hardly used. His juxtaposition of light and dark creates a striking cinematic canvas. A good deal of the discussion revolves around the photography of Mystery Street and how significant it is in creating the right atmosphere. The film deals with forensic methods in solving a crime, a topic that became the basis of many TV shows in later decades. There’s a sense of detachment as the cops and scientist try to form a sense of the victim, which conveys a verisimilitude. The narrative progresses from varying viewpoints, and there are touches of dark humor. The final scene is reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes or a Thin Man film.
Murder at Harvard – Mystery Street is a mystery “done up” as a film noir. Forensic science is at the forefront. The scientist looks at evidence from a fact-based perspective. The film was made early in the career of director John Sturges. Key scenes in Mystery Street occur at night. According to cinematographer John Alton, “Sometimes darkness is more beautiful than light.” The film might be the first to be shot entirely in Boston. Elsa Lanchester’s performance is singled out and we’re reminded that she has a “corner of fame” for playing the monster’s mate in Bride of Frankenstein.
Little Quacker – Tom and Jerry star in this 1950 Technicolor MGM cartoon. When a mother duck goes out for a swim, Tom steals an egg from her nest, cracks it over a frying pan, discovers a duckling, and concludes he can have a roast duck instead of a fried egg. But the uncooperative hatchling runs away from the cat and into a mouse hole, where he encounters an able protector in Jerry. Directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
Tom and Jerry in the Hollywood Bowl – Directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, this 1950 Technicolor cartoon features Tom conducting a symphony orchestra at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. But Jerry wants to conduct, too. He has his own baton and starts to conduct alongside Tom. When Tom notices the interloper, he attempts to get rid of the pesky mouse. But Jerry is persistent and the two battle it out, all while keeping the orchestra on tempo. When Jerry manages to get rid of all the musicians, Tom is left to play all the instruments himself.
Mystery Street is a good B picture but far from the best of film noir. There’s a host of interesting characters, but the execution is flawed. For one thing, with the exception of a brief rendition of Easy to Love that Vivian sings in a nightclub, there’s no music. The dialogue-heavy script could have used music to relieve the exposition. The film is also in need of more action. With its emphasis on the investigation, the basic rule of cinema seems to have been forgotten—movies have to move. At one point, I felt Mystery Street might have worked better as a play. Director Sturges probably lacked the clout at this point in his career to open up the film and pare down the dialogue. As an early showcase for forensic crime solving, however, Mystery Street is a landmark.
- Dennis Seuling