Classic Films in Focus: MYSTERY STREET (1950)

The visual and narrative style of Mystery Street (1950) will be familiar to anyone who watches modern police procedurals on television, especially shows that feature a lot of forensic analysis of corpses and crime scenes. Those looking for the intensity of top-shelf crime pictures will probably be disappointed, even with John Sturges in the director's chair and Ricardo Montalbán taking the lead as the police detective trying to catch a young woman's murderer. Still, the picture has its charms, especially for fans of the great Elsa Lanchester and those who really appreciate the piece-by-piece and bone-by-bone puzzle solving of forensic crime shows like Bones and the many iterations of CSI. 

Ricardo Montalbán stars as Lieutenant Peter Moralas, a police detective working in Cape Cod and Boston to solve the murder of Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling), whose skeletal remains are found months after she is last seen with a very drunk Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson). With only bones to examine at first, Moralas turns to Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), a Harvard forensics expert, for help in identifying the body and building a case to find her killer. Henry's wife, Grace (Sally Forrest), persists in believing in his innocence even as evidence against Henry mounts, while Vivian's shady landlady, Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester), tries to blackmail the real killer, a wealthy family man named James Harkley (Edmon Ryan).

It's not a spoiler to reveal the identity of the murderer because the movie does that in its opening, which shows us the events of the night Vivian dies and makes it clear that Henry is innocent. Thus, the audience always knows what Moralas and his associates are trying to learn, and the suspense lies in our concern that the cops will pin the crime on the wrong man. We have the completed puzzle in front of us, while the detectives have to find and try to fit each piece, and we can see how they get it wrong as they rush to convict the most obvious suspect. While Moralas tears apart the lives of the young couple, who are still grieving the child Grace miscarried on the night of the murder, we watch the crafty Mrs. Smerrling put the truth together like a blackmailing Miss Marple, but she has no interest in sharing her information with the cops. The picture lavishes attention on the amazing potential of forensic science but doesn't seem especially interested in making Moralas and the police in general look good, even at the end when Moralas weakly attempts to apologize to Grace for everything he has forced her and her husband to endure. 

The performances are a mixed bag, as well, but a few standouts are worth noting. Montalbán does a fine job with his character, although Moralas is not as developed and interesting as one would like for a protagonist. He has a few scenes that address his obvious identity as an outsider, and it's nice to see him push back against Harkley's prejudice and preening sense of superiority. Harkley himself is not a very interesting villain, just another rich white guy who thinks the world revolves around him, and Henry Shanway and Dr. McAdoo are both more plot devices than people. The female characters possess all the nuance and complexity the men lack, starting with Jan Sterling as the doomed Vivian, who isn't perfect but still deserves a lot better than her fate. Sally Forrest channels the helpless rage and grief of Grace Shanway beautifully, while Betsy Blair makes the most of her handful of scenes as Vivian's housemate, Jackie. Elsa Lanchester gives the scene-stealing performance of the picture as the greedy landlady, always assessing every situation and conversation for an opportunity to profit off from it, even though she underestimates her own peril in trying to blackmail a man she knows to be a murderer. 

John Sturges made several undisputed classics, including Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963). Mystery Street came on the heels of a very busy 1949 for Ricardo Montalbán, when he appeared in the Esther Williams musical romance, Neptune's Daughter, the gritty noir, Border Incident, and the war picture, Battleground, which also stars Marshall Thompson. See more of Jan Sterling in Johnny Belinda (1948), Ace in the Hole (1951), and The High and the Mighty (1954), the last of which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Catch Sally Forrest in a starring role in Ida Lupino's Not Wanted (1949), and don't miss Betsy Blair's Oscar-nominated performance in Marty (1955). For more of the brilliant Elsa Lanchester, see The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Ladies in Retirement (1941), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Bell, Book and Candle (1959). She's iconic in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), of course, but it doesn't give her nearly enough to do. If you want to see Lanchester as a proper detective, she plays a parody of Miss Marple in the star-studded mystery comedy, Murder by Death (1976).

Classic Films in Focus: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

Atomic age hysteria fuels the British low-budget shocker, Fiend without a Face (1958), in which invisible vampire brain monsters rampage through a Canadian village near a U.S. Air Force base. The title of this picture seriously understates the glorious weirdness of its killer creatures, who lack limbs, heads, and bodies as well as faces, even after they stop being invisible. The best known human associated with the movie is American actor Marshall Thompson, who takes the lead as the heroic major fighting to stop the bizarre beings, but the chief attractions in Fiend without a Face are definitely its monsters and the mayhem they inflict. If you're a fan of 1950s creature features like The Blob (1958) or even Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), then Fiend without a Face is just the sort of guilty pleasure you'll love to indulge.

Thompson plays Major Jeff Cummings, who works at the U.S. Air Force base just outside the bucolic Canadian town of Winthrop, where the locals are none too happy about the constant noise of planes and potential radiation generated by the military's atomic reactors. When villagers start dying under strange circumstances, the Canadians immediately blame the Americans, and Jeff tries to make peace with Barbara (Kim Parker), the attractive but understandably angry sister of the first victim. Jeff soon becomes convinced that Barbara's employer, Professor Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), is somehow connected to the deaths, but he's not prepared for the truth about the deadly creatures that Walgate's research has unleashed.

The acting in Fiend without a Face is better than that found in most pictures of its era and genre, although a lot of characters are only introduced in order to be killed off by the invisible monsters. The character types represented are familiar, including the practical soldier hero, the smart but feminine love interest, and the overreaching scientist, blinded to the consequences of his actions by his own ambition. Marshall Thompson and Kim Parker play their parts seriously but not woodenly, and they have a nice little romance brewing with moments of humor and humanity. Kynaston Reeves has some good scenes, too, as the aged professor slowly realizes his responsibility for the disaster and struggles to make things right. If the plot is frankly outrageous, and the monsters utterly impossible, the actors are at least good enough to keep the audience invested in the story and not overly conscious of the supremely nutty premise that drives the action forward.

Monster movies live and die, however, on the strength of their real protagonists, the creatures themselves, and Fiend without a Face offers some of the weirdest, most disturbing freaks of psychic science one could possibly imagine. For the first half of the movie they remain invisible, leaving us to deduce their natures from the clues they leave behind after each new attack. Special effects and some energetic acting from the victims offer hints about what the creatures are like and how they kill their prey; a farm couple is strangled, and an autopsy reveals that their brains and spinal cords have been sucked out through small holes in their heads. Later incidents provide new evidence, until the creatures get enough power to make themselves visible and horrify us with the full extent of their monstrosity. Thanks to Professor Walgate's imagination, they look like giant brains with spinal cords attached, and they move like sentient slugs, using tentacles to propel themselves and locate their targets. They ooze grotesquely when shot, and the finale turns into a brain slug bloodbath, with the surviving humans holed up in a house and surrounded by the persistent fiends. Their attack on the house prefigures the violent determination of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead (1968), but the vampire brains know how to cut the phone lines, which makes them even scarier. The brain slugs combine the grossest and most disturbing aspects of several different horror movie creatures, but it's hard to think of anything else quite like them in the genre's history. Where else are you going to get invisible atomic vampire brain slugs that leap on their victims to suck out their spinal cords?

Arthur Crabtree, who directed Fiend without a Face, started as a cinematographer; his other directorial efforts include Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and a dozen episodes of the 1950s Ivanhoe TV series starring Roger Moore. Marshall Thompson starred on the TV series, Daktari, and also appeared in films like Battleground (1949), To Hell and Back (1955), and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Look for character actor Kynaston Reeves in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) and School for Scoundrels (1960). For more atomic monsters, try The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Them! (1954), and Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955).