OVP: Mystery Street (1950)

Film: Mystery Street (1950)
Stars: Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, Jan Sterling
Director: John Sturges
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There was once a time before television, if you can believe it, and in this era before TV the movies picked up the slack when it came to certain things we take for granted on the small screen.  Take, for example, shows like Law & Order or CSI-these are two of the most popular shows of the past twenty years, and persistently show the minutia of crimes being solved.  That's what's on display in Mystery Street, a dime-budget drama that likely got its nomination due to its continual devotion to creating a factual, reality-based movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of the film is about as simple as you can get when it comes to a detective drama.  It opens with a beautiful blonde B-Girl (likely a prostitute...they figured out ways around calling them that back in the 1950's, but we know what they meant) named Vivian (Sterling) who is clearly in trouble.  She owes her nosy landlady (Lanchester) two weeks of rent and is intent on blackmailing a man from her past to get the cash.  She steals a car from a drunken stranger and then is shot by a mysterious man in the dark of night.

The film proceeds with Lieutenant Morales (Montalban) eventually taking the case, and using scientific reason and the latest technology, tries to deduce what happened to Vivian, first landing upon the hapless stranger whose car she stole and then eventually upon the actual killer in a pretty thrilling run through a train yard.  Along the way the audience learns about what it takes to actually solve a crime from a scientific perspective.

This is the aspect of the film that surely keeps this from being a dumpster bin B-movie that no one has seen in sixty years.  The movie actually partners with Harvard Medical school and in a scene that reeks of tedium (due to forensic science becoming integral to present pop culture years and years ago) we go through a step-by-step process of what happens when you examine a body.  There's expositional dialogue trying to convince people of why this was worthwhile (back then medical examiners didn't need medical degrees) and I'm sure it was thrilling to audiences who were learning about such things for the first time, but with the advantage of time (and knowledge) these scenes play as far too instructive and not organic enough to the actual film.

The acting in the movie runs the gamut.  I actually adored Jan Sterling's work early in the film-her blonde with an attitude was clearly part of a better movie, and she'd soon get bigger and better parts than this (Hollywood was paying attention), but someone like Sally Forrest as the wife of the initially accused stranger is just awful.  It may be that Forrest was much more at home on the stage (she played "The Girl" in the original Broadway run of The Seven Year Itch), but her acting is all-over-the-map.  The scene where she's packing and Ricardo Montalban is questioning her reeks of scenery-chewing, and the clunky dialogue is not helping matters (if you can't tell, I'm not wild about the attribute that brought this film to my attention).  All-in-all, even the hammy Elsa Lanchester cannot save this film from being exceedingly dull by the end of the picture, desperately still hoping for more of Jan Sterling's vivacity.

Those are my thoughts on this film, which my hunch is few of you have seen, but whose stars you might have opinions on so we'll start there.  Do you like Ricardo Montalban, or have a favorite Jan Sterling performance?  Do you ever find while you're watching old movies certain key attributes that clearly television stole as their own?  And does someone want to explain the precise difference between Motion Picture Story and Original Screenplay?  Share in the comments!