Mystery Street (1950)

Starring Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, Marshall Thompson
Directed by John Sturges
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A Cape Cod detective turns to a Harvard professor for help in determining how a skeleton discovered on the beach got there.

Almost a mystery in reverse, the film begins by showing us the identity of the murder victim and where and how she meets her fate, and then introduces us to Lieutenant Morales, who must deduce what we've just seen with only her skeleton as evidence.  Although Montalban was one of MGM's stars by this time, it's refreshing to see him headline the picture with nary a reference to his ethnicity, and he does a nice job in his role, convincingly portraying a dedicated cop on his first murder case.  The picture is also stylistically interesting, commencing with scenes drenched in shadow, a nice device symbolizing how much Morales has to uncover.

Marooned (1969)

Starring Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus, Gene Hackman

Directed by John Sturges
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

When a team of astronauts start wearing down after five months in space, they're ordered to return to Earth, but the engines on their ship fail, prompting desperate preparations for a rescue mission.

This film has a lot going for it, featuring an all-star cast, impressive special effects, and direction by the well-regarded Sturges.  It's an entertaining enough thriller but one deeply concerned with creating a fictional but authentic-seeming version of the actual U.S. space program, and the nonstop NASA jargon gets to be a bit tiresome.  For me, it's another example of the heightened realism sci-fi films were moving towards at the end of the 1960s, which I feel is somewhat unfortunate.  But for better or worse, the real-life journeys into space during that period ended up curtailing the imagination that went into these films, and the end result was the loss of the sense of fun prevalent in the productions of the preceding decades.