\u201cMystery Street\u201d is a 1950 black and white film noir that I decided to write about because it\u2019s one of very few old Hollywood movies shot in the Boston area.\u00a0 The plot is the story of Vivian Heldon, a girl who works at a low-class bar called the Grass Skirt.\u00a0 She\u2019s gotten pregnant by a married man and is trying to get him to pay for her child.\u00a0 She calls up the father Joshua Harkley who lives down on Cape Cod and tells him to meet her at her bar.\u00a0 When he doesn\u2019t show up and leaves his phone off the hook, she convinces a drunk to let her drive him home.\u00a0 But instead, she drives sixty miles to Harkley\u2019s town, Barnstable and calls him to force a showdown.\u00a0 Because the drunk (Henry Shanway) is starting to sober up and complain she abandons him on the side of the road and drives off with his car to the rendezvous with Harkley on a lonely road.\u00a0 Harkley shoots her and dumps her naked body in the ocean and drives the car into a canal.<\/p>\n
Three months later Heldon\u2019s skeleton washes up on the beach.\u00a0 The local police Lieutenant Peter Morales, played by the inimitable Ricardo Montalban, goes to the Harvard Medical School\u2019s crack forensic expert, Dr. McAdoo to try and discover whose bones were found and how she died.<\/p>\n
Using estimated date of death and a photograph of the skull on a transparency they superimpose it over each photograph of a missing woman from that time period and are able to determine that Vivian Heldon was the probable victim.\u00a0 Also, they find the bones of her unborn child and a broken rib that showed traces of the metal from a bullet and they deduce that Vivian was murdered.\u00a0 Next, they find from the bar patrons that Vivian left the bar with a man driving a specific color and model car.\u00a0 Looking into stolen car records for that date they find Henry Shanway.\u00a0 Once the bar patrons identify Shanway in a police line-up he is arrested for the murder.\u00a0 Also, Shanway\u2019s car is pulled out of the water sealing his fate.<\/p>\n
After that there is a whole bunch of interaction between Vivian\u2019s landlady and the murderer culminating in her stealing the murder weapon, a service .45 automatic that she found in his office desk drawer.\u00a0 Meanwhile Dr. McAdoo figures out that based on which rib was hit, it was possible that the bullet was still embedded in the car.\u00a0 Finding the bullet they then try to find the gun to cinch the story.\u00a0 But Shanway doesn\u2019t have a gun.\u00a0 This disturbs Morales who then starts checking the rest of Heldon\u2019s contacts to see if any of them had a gun.\u00a0 Of course, when he checks Harkley\u2019s desk the gun isn\u2019t there.\u00a0 But this alerts Harkley that the landlady has stolen his gun.\u00a0 He goes to her home and chokes her until she agrees to tell him where she hid it, a storage locker at the train depot.\u00a0 But just then the police show up and to keep her quiet Harkley hits the landlady on the head, knocking her out and eventually killing her.\u00a0 Harkley escapes but Morales finds the key to the locker and decides to stake out the depot and find out who tries to get the gun.\u00a0 After a lot of running around a train yard Morales catches Hartley and Shanway is saved from false conviction.\u00a0 Three cheers for forensic medicine and Ricardo Montalban.<\/p>\n
This is a solid B movie.\u00a0 The acting is pretty good and the forensic science was state of the art in 1950.\u00a0 But I have to take off points for lack of local authenticity.\u00a0 At one point one of the \u201clocals\u201d pronounces Barnstable as if it sounded like the two words barn and stable.\u00a0 Now admittedly I\u2019m a refugee here in New England with my Brooklyn accent and all, but even I\u2019ve picked up more of the local names than that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys both old movies and police procedurals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cMystery Street\u201d is a 1950 black and white film noir that I decided to write about because it\u2019s one of very few old Hollywood movies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[1910,43,339,38,1355,2180],"class_list":["post-16591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-film-noir","tag-movie-review","tag-new-england","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-ricardo-montalban"],"yoast_head":"\n