The Tattooed Stranger

This police procedural is no worse than many others of its era and better than quite a few. Obviously it is following in the steps of "Dragnet" and "Naked City" but emerges as an enjoyable programmer. The best thing about it is the unadorned look it provides into a world now long gone...the lower class New York of the late 40's/early 50's. Here it is in all its seedy glory, from the old-school tattoo parlors to the cheap hotels to the greasy spoons. These old police films are like travelogues to a bygone era and very bittersweet to anybody who dislikes the sanitized, soulless cityscape of today.

Also intriguing is the emphasis on the nuts-and-bolts scientific aspect of solving the crime...in this case, the murder of a tattooed woman found in an abandoned car. Our main heroes, Detectives Tobin and Corrigan, do the footwork, but without the tedious and painstaking efforts of the "lab boys", they'd get nowhere. Although the technology is not in the same league, the cops here use the dogged persistence of a C.S.I. investigator to track down their man.

The way some reviewers have written about this movie, you think it would have been directed by Ed Wood and acted by extras from his movies. What bosh! I enjoyed John Miles as the gangly ex-Marine turned cop Tobin...he had a happy-go-lucky, easy-going approach to the role that's a welcome change from the usual stone-faced histrionics of most movie cops of the period. Patricia Barry is cute and delightful as his perky girlfriend who helps solve the crime. Walter Kinsella is stuffy and droll as the older detective Corrigan. I rather liked the chemistry of these two and it made for something a bit different than the sort of robotic "Dragnet" approach.

The mystery itself is not too deep and the final chase and shoot-out certainly won't rank amongst the classics of crime cinema, but during it's brief running time, "The Tattooed Stranger" more than held my interest.

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.

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.

THE TATTOOED STRANGER was made two years after THE NAKED CITY and is obviously strongly influenced by it. Both films start with the murder of a woman and no clues. Both feature a team of a veteran and a neophyte detective. Both emphasize the legwork the young detective has to do, going from store to store throughout the city. In both the young detective tries to catch the killer alone. And both even feature a location with gravestones in the final chase. Yet, still, STRANGER is much more effective in capturing the real, everyday city, and is a memorable film in its own right. THE NAKED CITY rarely looks as though it were filmed with a hidden camera; in that bigger-budget production, the real locations look more like sets, with hired extras, studio camera-work and lighting, etc. (The exception, of course, is the breathtaking finale on the Williamsburg Bridge.) And the foreground action takes precedence; one doesn't get a strong sense of the texture of the city the way one does in STRANGER, where almost the entire film is made on various locations, including The Bowery.

The detection and the crime are quite realistic, and the bit players--including two tattoo experts and various luncheonette owners--seem as though they were pulled off the street. The excellent pacing matches a good script and performances appropriate to the story. The dialogue is sharp: pointing the body out to morgue attendants arriving just after the shootout, "He's over here, just the way you like him." And the young clean-cut cop has a nice sense of what a cop can get away with. In one of those greasy luncheonettes he tells a customer who seems interested in his conversation, "Joe, your ice cream's melting." With its real sense of the seedy atmosphere of the city, its agreeable pacing and crisp dialogue, THE TATTOOED STRANGER is a top notch film in its genre, able to hold its own in comparison to bigger-budgeted films.

I caught this on TCM this morning, and I must agree with many of the previous comments about the colorless actors and the lackluster script. I watched the movie with a friend, and part of the enjoyment of watching it was finding unintentional humor in the film. However, as also mentioned in many other comments, the shots of Manhattan, the Bowery, the Bronx and other areas of New York were fabulous, both interiors and exteriors, and wow, what a gorgeous black & white print! And we did find the detective work in it to be of interest --identifying the grass in the dead woman's car, tracking down the tattoo artist who in turn was able to identify the work of another artist, etc. I don't agree with other reviewers who deem the film "worthless"; the outstanding cinematography alone makes it worth one viewing, and it was fun to see Patricia Barry (White) cast as a botanist, and a young Jack Lord in a non-speaking role in one of the group scenes. I think that with just a little more display of emotion from the actors, and/or a better script, this could've been a really good movie.