| The Hollywood Issue | Spring 2009 |
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Cinema Veritas It wasn’t a dark and stormy night on the Quad; it was simply film noir. Boston’s first foray into cinema history occurred in the late 1940s when Hollywood moviemakers descended on the Hub to shoot a murder mystery. Initially titled Murder at Harvard but distributed as Mystery Street, the film offered celluloid tourism of Charlestown, Scollay Square, Cape Cod, Harvard Yard, and that marble marvel Building A, today known as Gordon Hall. Why Building A? For that answer, we need some context. It is night. A young woman hurries down the stairs of her rooming house and dashes for the hall phone. She’s in a pale, satiny dressing gown, and she shows a bit of leg in her headlong rush. You just know things aren’t going to go well for her. She dials, she demands, she receives unheard promises. And she leaves for work at a nightclub, the Grass Skirt. That’s right, the blonde is a B-girl. Hours pass, promises go unfulfilled, and the now angry woman calls again, this time threatening to show up uninvited. A clandestine meeting is set. Circumstance offers her transport. A drunken young man must move his car. She offers to help. In his alcoholic fog, he believes he’s going to Boston Lying-In Hospital, to his wife and the dead infant who would have been their firstborn. The woman, however, has other plans and steers the car toward Cape Cod. The man protests, they quarrel, and the Grass Skirt gal maroons the wayward husband and heads for her assignation amid sea grass and sand dunes. She makes the rendezvous; recriminations ensue. Moments later, she’s shot dead and carried to a sandy grave. The film then brightens; the young husband is receiving an insurance check to cover the cost of his “stolen” car. He’ll pay for that lie later. To this point during my viewing of the movie, I was comfortably entertained: A story I had started watching because it was partly set at Harvard Medical School was turning out to be a solid film noir drama. And although it wasn’t exactly shaping up to be The Maltese Falcon, I wanted to know who had done the deed. Then the movie offered me something to pique my personal interest. I was to be guided down this mystery’s path by one Dr. McAdoo, an HMS expert in forensic science, modeled after a real-life HMS professor of legal medicine: George Burgess Magrath, Class of 1898. Ah, I thought, a police procedural and a fiction of an actual alumnus. I moved closer to the television screen. A skeleton is found—a birder discovers it—and a Cape Cod detective, a Lieutenant Morales played by a young and dashing Ricardo Montalban, teams up with McAdoo to assess the remains. The skeleton tells McAdoo the victim was female; the bones of her feet hint that she’d been a dancer. Dogged paperwork by Morales yields pictures of far too many missing women. To see whether the skeleton had belonged to one of the missing, the two men huddle in a darkened room and watch as each woman’s face is projected against the body’s skull. A match is made and, before long, so is the link between the young woman and the young husband. He is accused and jailed. Morales begins to seek evidence for a conviction; McAdoo, man of science, continues to seek just the facts. Together they set a mean pace. Together, too, they begin to realize they may have the wrong man. Clues, when read by McAdoo, lead Morales in a new direction. The real culprit is found, chased through a train yard, and finally apprehended. The detective and the doctor get their man. Morales calls the wife of the once-accused to tell her the murder charges will be dropped. He doodles while he talks, and, as he hangs up, the camera peeks over his shoulder. There, in block letters, is the film’s last word: “HARVARD.” There it was: Harvard Medical School had saved the day. The moviemakers—who had come to Boston to shoot a dark fiction—had succeeded in hitting a luminous fact. Massad Gregory Joseph ’77 is a dermatologist in South Pasadena, California. To view the movie’s trailer, which includes a statement of gratitude to HMS, visit the movie’s website at Turner Classic Movies and click on the Mystery Street—Original Trailer link. Photo caption: In the 1950 movie Mystery Street, Ricardo Montalban (left) plays a detective who works with a Harvard Medical School professor, played by Bruce Bennett (right), to solve a murder that occurred on Cape Cod. Photo: Otto Dyar/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Photofest |
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