The Tattooed Stranger

Director Edward Montagne does in a little more than one hour what other, more expensive and hyped films fail to do. Mr. Montagne shows us a police story written by Phillip H. Reisman Jr. that while, is not one of the best of the genre, it keeps the viewer involved in all that's going on.

This is clearly a B type movie. In fact, the best thing going for "The Tattooed Stranger" is the opportunity to take a peek at the way New York looked in those years. The crystal clear cinematography by William O. Steiner, either has been kept that way through the years, or has been lovingly restored.

There are great views of New York in the opening sequence. Later we are taken to Brooklyn to the Dumbo section and later on the film travels to the Bronx and the Gun Hill Road area with its many monument stores in the area.

John Miles and Walter Kinsella made a great detective team. Patricia Barry is perfect as the plant expert from the Museum of Natural History. Jack Lord, who went to bigger things in his career, is seen in a non speaking role.

It was great fun to watch a city, as it was, because it doesn't exist any more.

Film and camera technology developed during World War Two paved the way for easy, inexpensive location shooting. So, in the late 40s, movies -- in particular, low-budget B-pictures -- started to break away from studio-built sets and to shoot on the mean streets of American cities. These changes also freed production from cumbersome studio systems and put the means of moviemaking into the hands of small, independent producers.

The Tattooed Stranger is a starvation-budget police procedural about the murder of an unknown victim; its cast and crew are all unknowns as well. A woman's body turns up in Central Park; later, in the morgue, police shoot a skid-row veteran hired to carve an identifying tattoo from her corpse. They have to find out first who she was, then who killed her. Their investigation takes them from brownfields in the Bronx to the bars and beaneries of Brooklyn and the Bowery.

This is the ratty old New York, before Robert Moses cleaned everything up by tearing everything down. The characters who inhabit firetrap tenements and patronize grungy tattoo parlors look like shell-shocked urban survivors, not slumming bit-players. The story, sweetened up slightly by a love interest of little interest, gets told flatly, with few frills. The Tattooed Stranger affords a brief, quasi-documentary glimpse into a squalid underside without benefit of sentiment or prettification.

A short, low budget production.

Most of the acting was a bit wooden,but the dialog had it's moments. A police procedural much like the first half of a "Law and Order" episode. NO hunches or lucky coincidences, just good old-fashioned police work - both forensics and leg work solves the case. A well-structured chain of evidence leads detectives to their murder suspect.

Watch for brief appearances of a very young Jack Lord as a police lab assistant.

All-in-all a pretty good movie.

This is a great B film from the 1950's, because it deals with forensics just like the present day CSI Series TV shows. The police take it step by step in the laboratory and look at all the evidence with a fine toothed comb! Howard Hughes produced this film for only $124,000 and most of the filming was done in NYC, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, Queens. John Miles,(Detective Frank Tobin),"Gunfighters",'47 was a ex-marine who was able to get a college education and met up with a gal named Patricia Barry,(Patricia White),"Dear Heart",'64, who was able to assist Frank Tobin in his investigation into a young woman who had a Tattoo and was found in Central Park. If you really like B&W Classic B Films, this is a very worth while to just sit back and enjoy from beginning to END!

No familiar names at all to movie fans appear in The Tattooed Stranger as this New York based film was shot there with players who more or less made Broadway their beat.

A woman is found dead stripped of all her identity and all they had to go on was a couple of tattoos side by side done at different times.

Forensic detective John Miles is teamed up with beat cop Walter Kinsella to solve this crime, but first they have to find out who before why.. Patricia Barry consulting botanist is on the hunt as well.

The deceased I will say had quite a racket going on and there is someone not happy with it or her.

Nicely done like a CSI episode.