Edward Montagne's The Tattooed Stranger 1950

One of the seediest films ever made.
--Carl Macek, Film Noir (The Overlook Press, 1979)

Although Eddie Mueller showed The Tattooed Stranger in Noir Alley on TCM I would not call it a film noir, as much as I enjoyed the film:  it had little alienation or fatalism, there were no night scenes and it had a happy ending (the curse that keeps many B films from becoming truly noir).  It did have lots of great location shots of New York City, including Brooklyn, the Bronx and the Lower East Side and interesting minor characters, from a waitress to a cemetery owner  1950 was getting to the end of B movies, as director Edward Montagne and actors John Miles, Patricia Barry nd Walter Kinsella were poised to enter television, where they spent the rest of their careers.

The Tattooed Stranger crams a great deal into its 64 minutes, from murders in Central Park and a tattoo parlor to a love story between a cop and the botanist who identifies the grass in the car where a woman was murdered.  The cinematography by William Steiner and direction by Montagne are workmanlike and there is a nicely choreographed shootout in a yard crammed with burial monuments.