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Sunday, May 18, 2008

MYSTERY STREET (1950)

John Sturges megged this trim police procedural, with heavy noir trimmings, shortly before moving on to bigger budgets. Jan Sterling is the good-time gal whose murder gets pinned on the wrong guy (blandly likable Marshall Thompson) and Ricardo Montalbon is the detective who works with Harvard Prof Bruce Bennett, shoe leather & forensics working hand in hand to find the right guy . . . eventually. It plays like an antediluvian episode of CSI, but it’s really M-G-M aping the popular Louis de Rochemont formula of factoid crime dramas over @ 20th/Fox. What does stand out is the nice casting of Montalbon in a role that was rarely filled with Hispanics at the time and a typically OTT perf from Elsa Lancaster as a Janus-faced lush with blackmail on her mind.

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