MYSTERY STREEET (1950)

You could say that this movie was 50 years ahead of its time, as it plays out a little like "CSI: Boston," or as my partner put it when he saw me watching this on Turner Classic Movies, "CSI: TCM." It does a nice job of balancing the genres of police procedural and film noir. The opening segment is pure noir: a blonde bad girl comes to no good end. Trampy Jan Sterling is in a jam with her rent money (and, as we find out later, she's also pregnant) and after she calls her married lover to arrange a meeting to get some money, she promises nosy landlady Elsa Lanchester she'll get the money the next day. However, at the Grass Skirt bar, the lover doesn't show, so Sterling picks up drunken Marshall Thompson, a poor slob whose sick wife is in the hospital having just lost her baby. He takes her out to Hyannis where she ditches him, stealing his car to confront her lover (Edmon Ryan) who promptly shoots her dead and dumps her and the car into the water. Some time later, Sterling's skeleton washes up at Cape Cod and police detective Ricardo Montalban has to find out who she is and who killed her. He solicits the help of Harvard forensics professor Bruce Bennett who uncovers clues from the bones of the victim. A web of circumstantial evidence begins to tighten around Thompson, who is arrested on suspicion of murder, but landlady Lanchester puts 2 and 2 together first and tries to blackmail the real killer. All this leads to an exciting chase at a train station with justice prevailing in the end. Montalban is quite good in the lead, and Lanchester steals all her scenes playing against her usual dithering type as a greedy and fairly cold-blooded schemer. Sally Forrest, second billed as Thompson's wife, doesn't have much to do until toward the end. Willard Waterman has an amusing bit as a mortician and old pal of the deceased. The issues of race and class are brought up briefly when the rich blueblood Ryan casts aspersions on the "upstart" Hispanic Montalban; it's a short and subtle but effective scene. I have no idea how the title fits in. Recommended. [TCM]