Mystery Street

Mystery Street is a 1950 American black-and-white film noir featuring Ricardo Montalbán, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, and Marshall Thompson. Produced by MGM, it was directed by John Sturges with cinematography by John Alton. The film was shot on location in Boston and Cape Cod; according to one critic, it was "the first commercial feature to be predominantly shot" on location in Boston. Also featured are Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and Harvard Yard in nearby Cambridge. According to Frances Glessner Lee biographer Bruce Goldfarb, the story of the death of Irene Perry, in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1940, as suggested by Glessner Lee (creator of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death), was the basis of the film. The story earned Leonard Spigelgass a nomination as Best Story for the 1951 Academy Awards. Plot Brassy blonde B-girl Vivian (Jan Sterling) is agitated and seeking to arrange a meeting with a man she has been dating. In spite of confiding to him she's "in trouble", he refuses to meet her at the bar where she works, "The Grass Skirt", in Boston, and stops taking her calls. She then picks up a very drunk Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), so she can use his car to drive to Cape Cod to confront the man face to face. Vivian drives. When Shanway realizes he's out on the Cape some 60 miles from Boston he demands to be taken back. Instead, she ditches him and steals his car. When Vivian meets up with her reluctant beau, he shoots and kills her. He hurriedly buries her body in the dunes and sinks the car in a pond.