The Tattooed Stranger

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.

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.

I picked up on this movie on a dull afternoon. I was intrigued by the title and didn't realize I'd seen it before. I'm glad I took another look.

I glanced at some of the reviews and, for the life of me, I can't understand why this movie was almost universally panned. It's not Detective Story, or The Naked City, and it was never meant to be. This is a little forgotten gem, rescued from obscurity by TCM. We get to see the cops processing evidence using methods that today seem primitive. The lab scenes take us back to pre-DNA days. It reminds us of a time when the police used logic instead of computers to work out a solution.

I admit that the acting is less than outstanding, but gee what atmosphere. The lunch wagons, the shoe repair shops, the tattoo parlors, and the seedier side of life in Brooklyn when it was still interesting.

My advice to some of my more critical friends would be: don't try to make a silk purse out of sow's ear. It is what it is.

Note: The part of Johnny Marseilles, the tatoo artist, was played by Arthur Jarrett who was a famous tenor in the 30's and 40's. He once sang with some of the famous early bands such as Ted Weems. You can see him in his prime as the singer in another TCM classic called Dancing Lady, with Joan Crawford.

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.

Although a grade B movie with the cast seldom seen elsewhere, this movie packs a punch. First it has good dialogue with a lot of quirky, almost hidden, humor. Best of all it gives the viewer a look at the seedy side of New York City in the early post-WWII era. The police methods may be dated but they are still of historical interest. It's also a good sociological perspective of the period and shows the viewer how times have changed, especially concerning the "art" of tattooing. It is also fast paced and though there's nothing new in the plotting, the story holds the viewer's interest. The acting may not be top notch, but it's also not Joe Namath. Forget its grade B status and just enjoy.