I am adding a new one to my list of film noir favorites: The Tattooed Stranger. For a film that is just a little bit more than an hour long, The Tattooed Stranger packs in a lot of information and entertainment. And if you like history as much as I do, it is also a visual record of New York City as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen the film several times and found more to like each time. Everything about it is low budget and minimalist, and it all works in its favor.
The film starts with a man walking his dog through Central Park in New York City. The dog leads him to a parked car, and the man is shocked to find a deceased female in the passenger seat. The man rushes to the driver’s side of the car and honks the car horn, which alerts a police officer on horseback. It isn’t long before other officers arrive and surround the vehicle. They question the witness, and homicide detectives and the medical coroner are called to the scene.
The crime scene has a few clues. The car was stolen in the Bronx and reported by the car’s owner. The detectives take fingerprints, a cast of a footprint, samples of all the materials (dirt, grass, vegetation) that they find in the car. However, the woman is a Jane Doe. There is nothing on her person or in her purse to identify her.
Captain Lundquist assigns the case to Lieutenant Corrigan and pairs him with new homicide detective, Frank Tobin. Lundquist is impressed with Tobin: He has a college education and a good war record; he was a military police officer in the army. Lieutenant Corrigan is still a little worried about working with Tobin; he jokes with the captain that his grammar might be too poor to measure up.
Tobin is transferring from his work in the police crime lab, and he is convinced he will miss the work. His boss, Captain Gavin says that they will still be working together on cases but that Tobin shouldn’t put all his faith in modern (1950) criminal science: “Now, look, Tobin, you hang around this place too long and you begin to think that the answer to everything can be found on a microscope slide and spectrograph reading. Oh, those things help. Science can help a lot. But remember, 90 percent of an investigation is still carried on in the inside of a man’s head and the bottom of his feet.”
The medical examiner had already examined the body of Jane Doe when he leaves the examining room, and his completed examination is a lucky break because a man enters and tries to carve up her body. A foot chase ensues inside police headquarters, and the intruder is eventually shot and killed. Lieutenant Corrigan recognizes him: Billy Alcohol, already known to the police because he is always being picked up for public drunkenness. The detectives learn that Billy Alcohol was hired to attack the dead body, and the medical examiner can figure out why. Jane Doe had a tattoo on her wrist, and it is an important clue in a case that has so few.
(This article about The Tattooed Stranger contains spoilers.)
Another important clue is a plant specimen found at the crime scene that Captain Gavin cannot identify. He and Captain Lundquist send Detective Tobin to the Museum of Natural History for some research about it. Lieutenant Corrigan is off to inquire at different restaurants to see if he can find where Jane Doe worked because the medical examiner guessed that she spent most of her days on her feet.
At the Museum of Natural History, Detective Tobin meets Dr. Mary Mahan. He is surprised to learn that the PhD plant specialist is a woman. (It helps to remember that the film was released in 1950, when women were leaving the workforce and giving up jobs for returning service members.) They identify the plant, but Dr. Mahan remembers that additional research on the plant was done at the Botanical Garden. She and Detective Tobin head there next to learn that the unknown plant sample found at the crime scene was once found in a vacant lot on the south corner of Gun Hill Road and Grand Boulevard (in the Bronx, according to my online search; no one says so specifically in the film). These scenes serve another purpose: Detective Tobin and Dr. Mahan are attracted to one another and thus provide a bit of romantic interest in the film—no femme fatale for this film noir.
Lieutenant Corrigan distracts Detective Tobin from his budding romance because he wants Tobin to join him for a tour of what he calls “art galleries,” that is, tattoo parlors, on the Bowery. They need to show the photo they have of Jane Doe’s tattoo to tattoo artists in the hope of finding the artist and perhaps learning the victim’s identity. They finally find Johnny Marseille, who tells the detectives that he recognizes the tattoo. He also recognizes the woman from the photo they have of her dead body on the examiner’s table. He doesn’t know her name, but he remembers that she came with a man, a regular customer named Al Radditz. They got matching tattoos at the time, which he thought was romantic. She came in maybe a year later to have the tattoo altered, which is the one in their photo. Johnny Marseille and the detectives surmise that she and Al Radditz broke up and she found a new boyfriend.
From this point on, the two detectives, Tobin and Corrigan, follow the clues and put in the footwork to solve the case. The work is painstaking, and they follow one detail after another, which means the plot goes from one point to another. Once again, I have to point out that The Tattooed Stranger, like so many films noir, needs careful attention to detail. And it’s easy to miss something. It also helps to do a little bit of research because the film includes many cultural references that film viewers in 1950 would have known and taken for granted. Here are just a few examples of what I mean:
◊ Lieutenant Corrigan gives Detective Frank Tobin the nickname “Luther Burbank” after Captain Gavin sends Tobin to the Museum of Natural History to investigate the plant specimen that cannot be identified. I had no idea who Luther Burbank was and had to look up his name to learn something about him. Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was a U.S. botanist, horticulturist, and agricultural scientist—and he had his own active website! Click here if you want to learn more about him at his own webpage at that site.
◊ Detective Tobin tells Dr. Mahan that his homicide case is in the news, but he is joking. When she asks for proof, he directs her to a comic strip in the newspaper. Dr. Mahan tells Tobin that she will feel like Tess Trueheart if he stands her up for their dinner date. Tess Trueheart was a name I thought was associated with the comic strip Dick Tracy, but it was still a name I had to look up, just to be sure. Tess Trueheart was indeed the girlfriend of Dick Tracy, famous cartoon detective of the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould in 1931. Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the list of characters, including Tess Trueheart, in the Dick Tracy universe.
◊ Tobin starts a running gag with Lieutenant Corrigan at the beginning of their murder investigation with the following crack: “I knew a tattooed WAC once.” WAC stands for Women’s Army Corps, created during World War II. The Tattooed Stranger was released in 1950, only five years after the end of the war, and it’s a good bet that U.S. film viewers were intimately familiar with all the nation’s defense forces. Click here to learn more about the WAC at the National WWII Museum.
The running gag about the tattooed WAC is one example of the humor in the film. There is a lot of good-natured fun and comradery among all the police officers and detectives. The humor keeps the homicide investigation from getting too burdensome, for the characters and the viewers!
The on-location shooting in New York City is spectacular. The investigation takes the detectives to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx; they certainly cover a lot of territory. The film has inadvertently become a great historical film record of New York City in 1950, now seventy-five years ago. (One thing that surprised me a bit was the amount of litter in the streets. The city was not especially clean seventy-five years ago.)
One of the pleasures of seeing the film several times was my increasing appreciation for Walter Kinsella’s portrayal of Lieutenant Corrigan and his relationship with Detective Tobin. Because of these two detectives, The Tattooed Stranger was a buddy cop film before the term was invented. The two share most of the jokes, and they trade mock insults and one-liners with each other. It is obvious that the two characters, the two actors (Walter Kinsella and John Miles), enjoyed working together on this film. They managed to trek all over Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx on a short production schedule and on a tight budget. They even tour tattoo parlors on the Bowery back when it was a neighborhood populated by people who had problems with alcohol and public drunkenness.
And they have fun doing it, which means fun for viewers, too.
February 9, 1950 (premiere in New York City), March 11, 1950, release dates • Directed by Edward Montagne • Screenplay by Philip H. Reisman Jr. • Music by Alan Shulman • Edited by David Cooper • Cinematography by William O. Steiner
John Miles as Detective Frank Tobin • Patricia Barry as Dr. Mary Mahan • Walter Kinsella as Lieutenant Corrigan • Frank Tweddell as Captain Lundquist (aka Lundy) • Rod McLennan as Captain Gavin • Henry Lasko as Joe Canko • Arhtur L. Jarrett as Johnny Marseille • Jim Boles as Fisher • William Gibberson as Aberfoyle • Jack Lord as Detective Deke Del Vecchio
Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures Inc. • Produced by RKO Pathé Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment