Mystery Street

Reminds me of Dassin's Naked City, and is similarly flat in tone, barely qualifying as a true "film noir." It's a by-the-book police procedural above all, and the movie only begins to pick up steam again in the final 15 or 20 minutes, when the actual murder plot comes back into play. It's not a bad movie, it's just a very vanilla one, and I wouldn't classify it as a film noir.

A low-budget police procedural with occasional splashes of noir expertly rendered by cinematographer Alton. Montalban is likable, and it is fun watching them use all the 60 year-old "cutting edge" forensic technology.

The opening 10 minutes gives a glimpse of what could have been, a well crafted sense of foreboding, dark cinematography and rapid pacing. Then we get a murder and it all dissipates, replaced by Montalban doing his best to carry a film whose structure boils down to "drop a random revelation every 10 minutes for HARVARD to work its tortured logic on." Occasionally this leads to a fun scene, more often it leads to the film treading water, at worst it leads to a screeching Ella Lanchester.

It drags at places but then it has scenes like them superimposing the image of the skull on the girl's faces or the final foot chase that are just great. Good use of the Boston/Cape Cod setting too.

Engaging crime thriller starring Ricardo Montalban as a dashing young detective with streetwise partner Wally Maher who crack a murder case with the help of Harvard University in one of film's earliest depictions of crime forensics; made all the more interesting by time period and locale (said to be the first film shot entirely on location in Boston). Masterfully directed by John Sturges with good doses of humor and great acting all around, although I would hesitate to call this a film noir as i

Plays more like an industrial film with noir flourishes. Just as forensics were at its infancy so was the CSI narrative not yet fully formed to dramatize it. There seems to be a dramatic detective story trying to be told but this "Oscar nominated" script is too bland to make dramatic use of the natural conflict when new methods upheave the old. That even Montalban and Lanchester are more reserved than usual attests to this stymied approach. Only worth seeing if you're curios about the cast/crew.

Highly entertaining police procedural/wrong man flick. The film is loaded with black humor and colorful characters... especially Elsa Lanchester, who absolutely steals the show. I tend to put procedurals in a separate category or offshoot of noir, but I still enjoy them. This movie always manages to keep things interesting. And fantastic noirish visuals. I was pretty engaged throughout the length of the film. It does have a bizarre, fragmented narrative, but it totally worked for me.

The movie gets off to a pretty great start, boasting Alton's stark photography to lend a sinister tone to a great murder scene. Then the detective work starts when the sun comes up the next day, and it stays there. The movie loses a lot of steam for the entire middle section. It's very casual and boring, Alton's cinematography ceases all chiaroscuro, and Montalban has virtually zero screen presence. It ends on a pretty high note though, when it dips back into a darker tone.

A Noite de 23 de Maio estreava há 70 anos no México. Esse filme é muito a frente de seu tempo por mostrar aspectos da criminologia forense muito antes de sua popularização no cinema e TV, sem falar que tem um aspecto Psycho pela protagonista cujas passos estamos seguindo morrer nos primeiros minutos de filme. Box Versátil Filme Noir Volume 7.

An early CSI-style murder investigation with a hard-working detective trying to get the right man. Montalban is the best actor, and he carries the film.

I really liked this one. Not sure why. There wasn't any special gimmicks or anything. But seeing Ricardo Montalban do detective work and Elsa Lanchester being a eccentric busybody was enough to be really really entertained.