The Tattooed Stranger

Another movie that I watched off my DVR recently was the Noir Alley entry The Tattooed Stranger. To be honest, I don't know that I'd consider it a noir, as it's more of a straight police procedural, but I'm glad that Eddie Muller introduced it since he goes into so much detail about the movies he presents.

The movie starts off with a man walking his dog in Central Park, New York City, one morning. The dog starts scratching at a car door and getting quite agitated. The man goes up to the car and sees a woman inside, and tries to get her attention. Good luck with that one, since the woman is really quite dead.

The police come to investigate, and they can't find anything to tell them who this woman is, and certainly not how she ended up dead in Central Park. The only clue they have to go on is that she's got a tattoo. (Well, they can run the plates, but they'll find the car was stolen so that's not much help.) The case is given over to veteran detective Corrigan (Walter Kinsella) and his partner for whom this is his first case as a detective, Tobin (John Miles).

The case is going to involve a whole lot of legwork. One of the clues from the autopsy leads the detectives to believe the victim might have worked at a greasy spoon, so let's call all the greasy spoons and detective agencies to see who's looking for a new employee. Meanwhile, they'd like to find who did the tattoo, to see if he knows his client. Also, somebody else knows about the death, because a crazy drunk tries to gut off the tattoo so nobody can identify it.

One other clue is some grass, which Tobin takes to the botanical gardens. There he meets Mary Mahan (Patricia Barry, credited as Patricia White), who helps identify the grass, which is not native to New York City, although there have been reports of it being a weed in a few places up in the Bronx. That's a clue. And since there's a lady botanist, you know that Tobin is going to start to develop a romantic attraction to here that's pointless to the plot, but doesn't really take away from the movie.

Eventually, they're able to find from the woman's tattoo, which was modified to look like the Marine Corps logo, that she had a series of boyfriends and husbands all in World War II, from whom she was getting the allotment checks. So perhaps she has a disgruntled ex-boyfriend?

As a police procedural, The Tattooed Stranger would be a fairly pedestrian (but not bad) movie. But what makes it work is the ultra-low budget. This was made by RKO's documentary unit in New York, and with the low budget they resorted to lots of location shooting, in places of New York that no longer exist as they were in 1950. It's an invaluable look at the seedy side of New York. That makes The Tattooed Stranger well worth a watch.

The Tattooed Stranger is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.