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Book excerpt: 'Mystery Street' We all know The Departed. But fewer of us know the other movie mentioned in Big Screen Boston's subtitle, Mystery Street. So here is an excerpt of the book's entry on this 1950 film noir, the first movie to predominantly feature location shooting in the Hub.
1950. Directed by John Sturges. Written by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks. Based on Leonard Spigelgass’ story. With Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, Marshall Thompson, Edmon Ryan, Betsy Blair and Jan Sterling. Cinematography by John Alton.
HOLLYWOOD FINALLY CAME TO Boston for this 1950 thriller, the first commercial feature to be predominantly shot in the area. Like the later (and lesser) Walk East on Beacon!, Mystery Street (also known as Murder at Harvard) rides the post-war wave of realistic crime dramas, pioneered by low-budget films like Anthony Mann’s T-Men, many of which were shot on location. Director John Sturges’ movie doesn’t quite use the semi-documentary approach that Walk East and other similar movies did. In this case, that’s all for the better. T-Men director of photography John Alton, one of the essential film noir cinematographers, is behind the camera here, bringing a sense of shadowy dread to the Boston locations in this pre-CSI police procedural in which a human skeleton is the only evidence with which an investigation starts.
Alton’s work is most evident in the set-up for the detective work that will follow. The movie opens in a Beacon Hill rooming house where darkness dominates, except for the light that shines on desperate Vivian Helding (Jan Sterling, right in photo above; click on it for larger view), the house phone she’s using and the ajar door of eavesdropping landlady Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester). It turns out Vivian, a B-girl at a Scollay Square dive called The Grass Skirt, is pregnant, and the married Hyannis man who fathered the child is giving her the brush-off.
At The Grass Skirt, where Vivian’s boyfriend has stood her up, she gloms onto drunk Henry (Marshall Thompson), “helps” him move his car and keeps driving it to the Cape, where she eventually ditches Henry and meets with the boyfriend, whose face isn’t shown. He shoots her, dumps her body in the ocean and pushes the stolen car into a lake.It’s only months later, when a birdwatcher finds Vivian’s skeleton sticking out of a sandy beach, that the investigation begins. Barnstable County investigator Pete Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) is on the case, which eventually leads him to Beacon Hill, Cambridge and Harvard Medical School’s Department of Legal Medicine in Roxbury. That’s where Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) helps Moralas identify the body and build a case against unwitting Henry, who initially denies he met Vivian because he’s married and wasn’t supposed to be in The Grass Skirt (he was supposed to be at the Boston Lying-In Hospital with his pregnant wife). But that changes when McAdoo discovers the cause of death was a gunshot, putting Moralas on a collision course with the well-to-do Hyannis boyfriend (Edmon Ryan). He is finally shown to the audience halfway through the movie, when snooping Mrs. Smerrling tries to blackmail him.
As crime thrillers circa 1950 are wont to do, Mystery Street climaxes in a public place, Trinity Station. This long-gone train station adjacent to Back Bay Station is a suitably bustling, urban backdrop for the end chase (its train yard is apparently now part of the Mass. Pike). Although the rooming house is on fictional “Bunker Street,” the building used appears to be on Pinckney Street near Anderson Street (you can see the old New England College of Pharmacy there at one point). Suspect Henry lives in Charlestown (in a forward-looking movie connection, just a half-block from Monument Avenue), while The Grass Skirt exterior is on a studio backlot. Aside from the dunes footage (presumably) it’s unclear if any of the Cape Cod action was done there; the gas station with the greasy spoon attached looks to be in California (its signs for Caloco Oil sure sound West Coast). There’s also a Harvard Yard sequence that turns out to be rather inconsequential (since the cop finds out he has to go over to the Med School), but it adds to the movie’s local color. Amusingly, co-star Thompson (later of TV’s Daktari) appears on the movie’s trailer to offer special thanks to Harvard for its cooperation, something the school generally doesn’t offer anymore.
Like Alton’s artful Hollywood cinematography, non-local flavor comes from the cast, with Lanchester, the bride of Frankenstein herself, practically stealing the show with her proper yet hypocritically opportunistic landlady. Years before he became kitsch, Montalban is a sturdy presence in this brisk B-thriller
Locations: Beacon Hill, Roxbury, Back Bay, Charlestown, Boston; Cambridge; Cape Cod.►Accents: Back in a time when there probably were a greater percentage of area residents with Boston accents than there are now, Mystery Street generally refrains from including them. But there are generic New England accents from Cape Cod characters talking about the found skeleton. And we do get what might be Hollywood’s first overdone Boston accent from Wally Maher, who plays the Boston detective Moralas teams with in the city. Maher, who also voiced the title character in Tex Avery’s Screwy Squirrel cartoons, couldn’t quite get the Boston accent.Local color: Over 50 years later, many of the shooting locations will have you wondering their exact whereabouts, especially Trinity Station. But the movie’s issues also hit close to home at times, specifically the hypocrisy of the landlady, a self-righteous moral guardian who no doubt supported many a Boston book banning, and the elitism of Vivian’s blue-blooded killer, who not only victimizes her, but also feels superior to first-generation American Moralas, and lets him know it.
Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' Don't miss the chance to see an archival print of the best damn movie ever made in Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. at the Coolidge Corner Theater on June 5 at 7 pm. I'll be there introducing the movie, and selling and signing books, too. Father to the more recent Boston "neighborhood pictures," from Monument Ave. to Gone Baby Gone, it has never come out on home video.1973. Directed by Peter Yates. Written by Paul Monash. Based on George V. Higgins’ novel. With Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco and Joe Santos. Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper. ALL HAIL EDDIE. THE gritty film adaptation of attorney turned writer George V. Higgins’ terse debut novel is the best movie ever made in Boston, a touchstone with a legendary status enhanced by the fact that it’s never been released on any form of home video. Director Peter (Bullitt) Yates’ movie is one of the few post-1960 color thrillers to capture the desperation and doom of 1940s and 1950s film noir. Of course, it helps to have Robert Mitchum, who headlined such vintage noirs as Out of the Past and Pursued, playing the title character. Mitchum and his hangdog persona perfectly embody the weariness of Coyle, an aging, working-class crook awaiting sentencing for transporting stolen goods who reluctantly becomes a police informer in hopes that his tips to “uncle” will win him leniency.
Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' Don't miss the chance to see an archival print of the best damn movie ever made in Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. at the Coolidge Corner Theater on June 5 at 7 pm. I'll be there introducing the movie, and selling and signing books, too. Father to the more recent Boston "neighborhood pictures," from Monument Ave. to Gone Baby Gone, it has never come out on home video.1973. Directed by Peter Yates. Written by Paul Monash. Based on George V. Higgins’ novel. With Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco and Joe Santos. Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper. ALL HAIL EDDIE. THE gritty film adaptation of attorney turned writer George V. Higgins’ terse debut novel is the best movie ever made in Boston, a touchstone with a legendary status enhanced by the fact that it’s never been released on any form of home video. Director Peter (Bullitt) Yates’ movie is one of the few post-1960 color thrillers to capture the desperation and doom of 1940s and 1950s film noir. Of course, it helps to have Robert Mitchum, who headlined such vintage noirs as Out of the Past and Pursued, playing the title character. Mitchum and his hangdog persona perfectly embody the weariness of Coyle, an aging, working-class crook awaiting sentencing for transporting stolen goods who reluctantly becomes a police informer in hopes that his tips to “uncle” will win him leniency.
Like Higgins’ novel—which is almost experimental in its preferred use of two-character dialogues instead of conventional narrative—The Friends of Eddie Coyle atmospherically presents the workaday tug of war between crooks and cops. Seen through the movie’s gutter’seye view of the world, everyone’s looking for a leg up on the other guy, a favor or some sort of insulation from jail (for the crooks) or bad work assignments (for the cops). Eddie Coyle is the common thread running among gun seller Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), bartender/hit man Dillon (Peter Boyle), federal agent Foley (Richard Jordan) and a group of robbers that’s striking suburban banks. As Coyle secures handguns from Jackie for the bankrobbers, Dillon keeps tabs on Eddie’s travels and Foley fields tidbits of info from both men. These tips are cast out like fishing lines, hoping to return a nibble from Foley that might bring a desired favor. One such nibble comes after Eddie sees machine guns in Jackie’s car trunk and hears him say he has to get to the train station at Sharon. He gets there, but so do Foley and a half-dozen other agents. Still, Eddie’s aid in Boston is not enough to get Coyle a break with a New Hampshire prosecutor, and you can feel the vice tighten around him. He’s faced with a no-win situation: do jail time or fink on guys who, unlike younger Jackie, are his contemporaries and cohorts. In its own low-key, Eddie-ish way, The Friends of Eddie Coyle works to a tragic ending that, hard to believe, makes a change in the story that actually improves upon Higgins’ plot.
Eddie Coyle is the first Boston movie with the guts to never be scenic (just look at the Quincy street Coyle lives on, with its row of drab, look-alike houses). It’s a grey, grey movie, because Eddie is stuck in a grey, grey world, lacking the resources to go to sunny Florida (as he laments) or the traction to climb out of his place on the crime ladder. Yates shot the movie in late 1972, with winter approaching, and you can feel the chill in the air. You often see the breath exhaled by characters during the conversations on the Boston Common or outside a Quincy Red Line station. The other locations are grungy spots Thomas Crown would certainly never be caught at, including Dillon’s bar (shot at the Kentucky Tavern at Mass. Ave. and Newbury Street), the cafeteria where Coyle and Jackie first meet (which appears to be on Boylston Street near Tremont), Boston Bowl and Dedham Plaza. A Weymouth bank, Memorial Drive, the old Boston Garden and even grim City Hall Plaza also serve the story very well. And rather than packing up back to Los Angeles for interiors, the production did everything here, even building sets, including the trailer belonging to robber Jimmy Scalise (hometown boy Alex Rocco), in Pier Five on the waterfront.Apparently, Higgins did an uncredited polish on Paul Monash’s script. When I checked with the Higgins archives at the University of South Carolina to see if the late novelist’s papers contained any info on the movie’s locations, the Boston; Quincy; Sharon; Milton; Weymouth; Dedham; Cambridge staff’s perusal of his archival materials from that period turned up at least one reference in his letters to restoring dialogue from the novel to the screenplay. Thirty-five years after it was released to audience indifference, it’s hard to watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle now and not think that it—the most essential movie Hollywood has made in Boston—deserves the awards, acclaim and popularity bestowed upon Mystic River, a lesser movie in the same vein. Oh, well. That’s showbiz.►Locations: Back Bay, North End, Beacon Hill
Boston; Quincy; Sharon; Milton; Weymouth; Dedham; Cambridge
►Accents: Surprisingly good. Mitchum, originally eyed for Peter Boyle’s role, manages to use a convincing Boston accent without losing his own distinctive voice. So Eddie comes off as an emotionally spent Mitchum character, and a neighborhood guy, too. Boyle and Richard Jordan use a light touch with their accents, too. Considering the strong sense of place the locations give the movie, thick accents might have been overkill. These guys sound right at home next to Alex Rocco.►Local color: “Numbah faw, Bobby Aw!” Eddie bellows from the Boston Garden balcony during a Bruins game featuring helmetless players and no ads on the ice or boards. Of course, Eddie and his “friends” would be into the big, bad Bruins (just as they’d be into the Pats today). The hockey sequence appears to have been shot during a real game, and that’s the kind of authenticity you get here. It’s not as if other movie productions were lining up to shoot at the Kentucky Tavern or fluorescent-lit cafeterias. The locations are so real I expected to see Eddie pop into a Zayre at some point, but no such luck.►Aftermath: Higgins fan Elmore Leonard borrowed the androgynous name Jackie Brown for the heroine of his novel, Rum Punch. When Quentin Tarantino made a film of Leonard’s book, he renamed the story Jackie Brown, as did the movie tie-in re-release of the book.
