RT Obscura, a new bi-weekly column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the Rotten Tomatoes archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his fifth column, Kim explores Mystery Street, a film combining noir sensibilities with science-heavy forensics investigations.

It's surprising that Mystery Street, an MGM 'docu-noir' picture from 1950, didn't spin off a TV series as its notable predecessor The Naked City did. The then-unusual premise could have worked for weekly cases, and the team-up of active and passive investigators -- Hispanic Boston cop Pete Morales (Ricardo Montalban) and tweedy 'legal medicine' expert Dr McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) -- makes for a more colourful partnership than the drab, Dragnet-style partnerships who dominated early TV crime series.

Indeed, it's one of the first realistic 'forensic' detection stories, laying the groundwork for shows like The Expert, Quincy ME, CSI and Silent Witness with microscope analysis of hair (dyed blonde with black roots), a bullet trajectory re-enactment which leads to the discovery of a spent shell in the bodywork of a car fished out of the sea, and an imperative that the cops don't just find the murderer but the gun he used in the crime.



Maybe the location (Boston, Hyannis Port and the environs of Harvard) would have been a stretch for an industry still clinging to LA and New York -- though MGM initially thought that venturing further afield was a big draw. The studio trumpets the use of locations and the cooperation of the educational establishment in the trailer and the script takes cares to include a few regional specifics like the understated friction between blueblood WASPs and an equally well-established though déclassé local Portuguese community.

It opens with a very noir set-up, as desperate bottle blonde B-girl Vivian Heldon (lazy-lidded Jan Sterling, in a vivid cameo) goes from a seedy mock-genteel boarding house to a sleazy dance joint, all the while trying to get through on the phone to her (married) upscale boyfriend to tell him she's pregnant. She picks up weak-chinned boob Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), on a drunken bender because his wife Grace (Sally Forrest) has just had a miscarriage, and drives his car out to the coast -- where her unseen lover shoots her dead.



Sometime later, a birdwatcher (weird-looking Walter Burke, in a typically eccentric characterisation) finds foot-bones stuck out of a dune and newly-promoted Pete takes the 'skeleton girl' case to the ivied halls, where McAdoo applies forensic deductive techniques to the bones (which include those of the unborn baby -- an especially strong touch for 1950). Naturally, Henry gets arrested for murder and seems liable to be convicted on circumstantial evidence -- but the various amateur and professional detectives on the case can't leave it alone, and there are more developments.