Elia Kazan (1950)
Panic in the Streets allowed Elia Kazan an opportunity for the location filming he’d been denied on his previous picture Pinky. This black-and-white thriller, set and shot mostly in the docklands area of New Orleans, gets off to a kinetic start. A group of men are playing cards in an upstairs room. One of the men, feeling ill and looking it, quits the game and leaves the building. The other players protest; two of them, on the instructions of a third, go after the deserter to get back money that he owes. The sick man stumbles through the nighttime streets, hardly aware of his surroundings: he wanders across railway tracks – it’s purely by chance he’s not struck by a passing train. On the other side of the tracks, he’s ambushed by his pursuers. When he tries to fight them off, he’s shot from behind, and killed, by the man who ordered the others to recover the gambling debt.
This whole opening episode is remarkable for its movement, atmospheric lighting (Joseph MacDonald), sharp editing (Harmon Jones) and, especially, the sense it conveys of life being cheap. That feeling isn’t immediately dispelled when, next day, the dead body is discovered and taken into a police morgue. A member of staff, as he examines the corpse, at first seems more interested in where he and the colleague he’s chatting to are going to have lunch. In the background, a woman briefly appears, to be shown another body. She says, ‘Yeah, that’s him’, without evident emotion, and disappears. Within a few screen seconds the attitude of the medical examiner, along with the mood of the film, has changed: he urges other staff to keep out of the autopsy room. Kazan then cuts to a pleasant domestic scene. A man is painting a chest of drawers, with advice, rather than practical assistance, from his young son. When his wife tells him he’s wanted on the phone by a work colleague, the man is initially reluctant to take the call: this is his first day off in six weeks. He takes the call, though, then hurriedly heads for his workplace.
The family man is Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark), a uniformed officer with the US Public Health Service. His morgue examination confirms the suspicions of his junior colleague: bullets killed the man but he was already suffering from pneumonic plague. Reed meets immediately with the police commissioner and local authority officials. Despite their initial scepticism, he convinces all concerned they have just forty-eight hours to save the city from a plague pandemic, by tracking down and inoculating within that time all who came into contact with the dead man. Reed also argues with police captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) that news of the plague case must, for the time being, be kept from the press.
The plot of Panic in the Streets fuses public health and law-and-order imperatives. While Reed is searching for everyone the murderee might have infected, Warren is on the hunt for his killers. The latter, in relation to the plague, are themselves potential victims (as well as potential causes of further death). The story (by Edna and Edward Anhalt) and screenplay (by Richard Murphy and Daniel Fuchs) place this noir – in retrospect – in the category of post-World War II Hollywood movies that absorbed and expressed the Red Scare zeitgeist, dramatising fears of the invasion and disabling of American society by a malignant alien agency. It emerges that the dead man Kochak (Lewis Charles) had just arrived in New Orleans on a foreign ship,
The set-up is ingenious and Kazan gives the story interesting details but they get to seem like tinkering at the margins as the cops-and-robbers-dynamic takes hold. The film’s interest in the other villain of the piece, deadly contagion, is relatively shallow. The two elements are well enough in sync for a while. Taking matters into his own hands, Reed identifies the ship that Kochak was on and persuades the crew to be inoculated. Another plague fatality (Aline Stevens) was the wife of the owner (Alexis Minotis) of a cheap restaurant, who earlier lied to the investigators about having served Kochak. But the narrative becomes intent on nailing the killer, a gangster called Blackie (Jack Palance), and his sidekicks Flitch (Zero Mostel) and Poldi (Guy Thomajan), to the extent of virtually ignoring any contact they might have had with things or people since their paths crossed with Kochak’s. The oversight is more glaring because Kazan captures so well the quotidian detail of the locale. He then ignores what Manny Farber memorably describes as ‘the career of germs left by Palance on various coffee sacks, Bendix washers, and scratch sheets’.
Richard Widmark is good in the scenes of Reed’s home life with his wife Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes, quietly nuanced and admirably unshowy) and their son (Tommy Rettig). In these bits, Widmark easily effaces his trademark vicious-rat screen persona but he’s less effective in the hero’s professional life. Widmark might be credible as a hard-nosed cop but isn’t so plausible as a public health medic. Since you don’t believe this side of Clinton Reed, his supposedly uncharacteristic behaviour in the face of crisis means less than it should. The early antipathy between Reed and Warren that turns to mutual trust and respect is essentially formulaic but Widmark and Paul Douglas play it well.
There’s a fine, tense scene in which Blackie, a no-nonsense nurse (Miriam Scott) and a dodgy doctor (Charles Robbins) debate what should happen to the plague-ridden Poldi, now mortally ill and delirious. When Reed arrives, thanks to a tip-off from the nurse, Blackie and Flitch speedily exit. Blackie carries the unconscious Poldi in his arms but, at the top of a flight of stairs, decides his old henchman is now more trouble than he’s worth. He chucks Poldi to his death: in this moment, the life-is-cheap charge of the early scenes returns with startling impact. The sequence also triggers the climactic chase around the wharfs of the New Orleans waterfront. It’s inventively shot and exciting, even if the idea of Zero Mostel being able to keep pace with a fugitive Jack Palance is amusingly incredible.
Palance, who had understudied (and eventually taken over from) Marlon Brando in Kazan’s Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, made his film debut in Panic in the Streets (he appears as Walter Jack Palance). He cuts a remarkable figure – his facial structure is extraordinary – and talks well too, at least when delivering Blackie’s more low-key lines. At the forefront of press interest in the plague is a journalist played by Dan Riss, who badly overdoes things (as he did in Pinky). In welcome contrast, Paul Douglas’s calm underplaying enriches the final, successful pursuit of Blackie. The cast also includes a selection of real-life New Orleans residents in minor roles. The most striking of them all is Elizabeth Dombourajian, as Poldi’s ancient grandmother.
4 February 2020
