Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Claudio Carvalho In Boston, the prostitute Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling) is pressed by Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester), who is the greedy owner of the boarding house when she lives, to pay the rent of the room that is late. She calls her wealthy lover and schedules a meeting with him at "The Grass Skirt", where she works. However he never appears and Vivian hijacks the drunken client Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson) and drives his car to Cape Cod. She stops at a diner and calls her lover again to meet him in a spot. When Henry awakes, Vivian lures him and leaves him on the road. When Vivian meets her lover, he kills her with a 45 mm, hides her body and dumps the car in a lake. A couple of months later, her skeleton is found near the beach. Detective Peter Morales (Ricardo Montalban) is assigned to investigate the case without any clue; however the coroner Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) from Harvard gives technical support to Morales and he finds the identity of Vivian. His further investigation leads him to Henry that lied to justify the hijack of his car to his wife Grace Shanway (Sally Forrest) and to the insurance company. Now Henry becomes the prime suspect and only his wife believe in his words. Will Detective Morales proceed his investigation and find the real killer?"Mystery Street" is an engaging film-noir directed by John Sturges. Ricardo Montalban is excellent in the role of a relentless detective that finds a suspect with all the evidences pointing to him but continues seeking out the real killer. However Elsa Lanchester steals the show in the role of a greedy and despicable woman. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "A Noite de 23 de Maio" ("The Night of May 23rd)

classicsoncall I can really appreciate a film I've never heard of when it delivers an intriguing story with compelling characters. Elsa Lanchester is positively off the rails here as a scheming, money obsessed landlady who has the temerity to attempt blackmail on a guy who's already killed someone, and she knows it! How she couldn't figure out that he might try to kill her just as handily kind of escapes me, but I guess she only saw the dollar signs. Funny, but I had the same impression of the pharmacist in "The Two Mrs. Carroll's" when he tried to put the screws to Humphrey Bogart. Not a smart move.If you didn't know who Detective Moralas was starting out, his familiar appearance might have driven you crazy while the story progressed. This is probably the earliest film I've seen Ricardo Montalban in and he did a nice job here as the Boston homicide cop. If nothing else, the story line reveals the excruciating detail that forensic investigation requires to catch a murderer. I don't really watch TV shows like CSI so maybe I'm not in tune to modern police methods much, but for an early story dealing with the science, it took one through a lot of twists and turns to find the killer.There was one remarkable element in the story that I got a bit of a chuckle out of having nothing to do with the movie per se, but with Mrs. Shanway's (Sally Forrest) stay at the hospital when she had the miscarriage. One of the receipts she produced for Moralas was a forty eight dollar hospital bill. I was born the same year this film came out, and believe it or not, my mother saved the hospital bill as well. Lest you think the amount they came up with here was made up for the movie, I can confirm that my own delivery was a bargain at sixty dollars!

bkoganbing Even though this was a B film even though B films from MGM were better than most, Ricardo Montalban must have liked working in this film for while he was a Latino cop he was not a Latin lover as he and Fernando Lamas in this era were always cast. Mystery Street casts him as a police detective getting and solving a missing person case that turns into a homicide.The victim is Jan Sterling and she's seen in a brief and memorable prologue where she's a girl who gets around. On her last night on earth she picks up distraught young husband Marshall Thompson at a diner and then drives off with his car. That's the last time anyone, but her murderer sees Sterling alive as she's killed and Thompson's car and Sterling disappear. When they are recovered it's a murder case and Thompson is the fall guy.One thing Sterling left behind was a little black book with all kinds of phone numbers all of the men in her life. There were over one hundred of them so you can see how Jan got around. Somewhere in that book is the number of her murderer and Montalban has to go methodically through them. In that Mystery Street becomes quite realistic showing that police work isn't all car chases and gun battles but a lot of routine checking of clues. There's a plum role in Mystery Street for Elsa Lanchester who was Sterling's landlady and a woman with an eye to make a quick buck. She catches on before the police do who the real killer is and it costs her dear.Some future Hollywood heavyweights were involved in the making of Mystery Street, it's an early film for director John Sturges who in a few years would be getting bigger budgets and writer Richard Brooks who would soon be directing. Other roles to take note of are Sally Forrest as Thompson's loyal wife and Bruce Bennett as a Harvard Professor of Pathology who is the forensics man on the case. Forensics are most important here.This is a neat noir film from MGM's B unit and at other studios this could be considered an A.

AaronCapenBanner John Sturges directed this interesting film that stars Ricardo Montalban as Lt. Pete Morales, a police detective from Boston who is investigating the death of a young woman, whose skeletal remains are found washed ashore on a Cape Cod Beach. In order to identify them, he takes them to Harvard professor McAdoo(played by Bruce Bennett) who helps Morales with a positive ID, which leads to the arrest of a young man(played by Marshall Thompson) for her murder. He claims he's innocent, and Morales is inclined to believe him, so further investigates this mysterious case. Montalban is good in unusual role for him, and film fascinating as an early example of forensics technology being used to solved crimes, which is quite popular on TV series today.