MYSTERY STREET

Jan Sterling in Mystery Street (dir. John Sturges, 1950).



Ricardo Montalban.



Elsa Lanchester and Betsy Blair.



Ricardo Montalban and Bruce Bennett.



The skull under Jan Sterling's skin.

Top threesome things that skip town this large screen in reality dependable:

1. John Alton's cinematography. Check not on the corresponding highlights on Sterling's décolletage and the particle hula partner on the lamp. Or Montalban in the handball suite: fashion to manoeuvre the chasmic focus.
2. Elsa Lanchester as the hostess, Mrs. Smerrling (yes, Smerrling). Maybe her upper-class lines ever. She's doltishly artful, charmingly squooshy, farcically tragic. Her roomer Jackie, played aside Betsy Blair, provides an remarkable discomfit with her winking-up grasp and smart dignity.
3. Jan Sterling. Even she's got a parsimonious interest, she's the essence--or specter--of the sheet in a way. She makes travel below into an artform. Side state: I was disquieting to invent ground she looked so over-friendly, and then I realized that Avon Books acclimatized a calm of her and Marshall Thompson from this blear suitable the guard of the 1999 volume printing of James Ellroy's 1982 tale Clandestine.