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John Sturges has never had the kind of respect Anthony Mann gained, despite, like him, moving from noir films to westerns and into blockbusters. It’s understandable, as where all of Mann’s films betray an innate sensibility, punctuated by vivid flourishes of cruel violence and raw physicality, Sturges was the definition of the intelligent professional director. But it’s worth noting that Mystery Street, as with Mann’s own brilliantly terse Border Incident, sports Ricardo Montalban (long before he became a pop culture joke) giving a neat performance in a crime drama that feels well ahead of its time, predicting our CSI age and one of the films that mediated the shift from the neurotic intensity of ‘40s noir into a new, leaner, more procedural type of crime genre.
John Sturges has never had the kind of respect Anthony Mann gained, despite, like him, moving from noir films to westerns and into blockbusters. It’s understandable, as where all of Mann’s films betray an innate sensibility, punctuated by vivid flourishes of cruel violence and raw physicality, Sturges was the definition of the intelligent professional director. But it’s worth noting that Mystery Street, as with Mann’s own brilliantly terse Border Incident, sports Ricardo Montalban (long before he became a pop culture joke) giving a neat performance in a crime drama that feels well ahead of its time, predicting our CSI age and one of the films that mediated the shift from the neurotic intensity of ‘40s noir into a new, leaner, more procedural type of crime genre.The first twenty minutes details a series of events that will be discovered, and mostly misinterpreted, in the ensuing investigation, as Bostonian B-girl Jan Sterling, pregnant by her sugar daddy and trying to squeeze him, is murdered, and sucker Marshall Thompson, through a series of circumstantial clues, is identified as the culprit.
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Montalban is cleverly cast as a Provincetown Portuguese police lieutenant, Peter Moralas, who has never worked a murder case before. When Sterling’s bones are found months after her murder, he takes them to be analysed by Harvard professor Bruce Bennett, whose laboratory specialises in such work, and which begins providing the clues that slowly unravel the case. The villain is a yacht designer (Edmon Ryan) who finds himself blackmailed by Elsa Lanchester, as Sterling’s tosspot landlady, deducing the culprit from the phone number Sterling left written on the boarding house wall.
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The film is built from layered observations of not merely investigation and the detailed exegesis on early forensic procedures, but also through pointed social and character vignettes: Ryan pretending to be kissing Sterling’s corpse as a car passes him carrying it to the sea, and later pricking Montalban with his sneering WASP chauvinism: “My family was here before there was a United States. By the sound of your accent your family hasn’t been here so long…”; Thompson’s wife (Sally Forrest) struggling through her husband’s impoverishing incarceration on the back of losing her child; even Sterling’s friend Betsy Blair has a neat moment handling a .45 and meditating on “what I learnt about guns…and the Marines.” .
Sturges makes skilful use of relatively unfamiliar locations – the windy beaches of Cape Cod, the tranquil grounds of Harvard, and the grimy charm of pre-urban renewal Boston. If it had been tightened a little, this would have been a minor classic. It’s also interesting in being set mostly in the poor districts of old Boston, long before the age of Dennis Lehane and The Departed, and being fuelled, like those more modern works, by an equally tart portrait of social resentments.
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