Today's noir
Watched "Mystery Street" again. The plot is fairly straightforward: a man is wrongly accused of murdering a prostitute; a police detective and a Harvard University scientist team up to find the real killer. This is a solid little noir, probably one of the earliest if not the first film to deal with the science of forensics and its use in identifying a body and solving a murder. John Alton's cinematography is breathtaking and the location shooting in the Boston area, specifically around Harvard, adds a nice touch of realism to the story. Ricardo Montalban is terrific as the detective -- it's a shrewd bit of casting given the large Portuguese population in the area. The supporting players include Bruce Bennett and Marshall Thompson. They're good, but Elsa Lanchester steals the film as a larcenous landlady. Look for Gene Kelly's then-wife, Betsy Blair, as the waitress/neighbor of the victim. My rating -- 3.5 of 5