FANTASIA OBSCURA: Widmark Chases a Villainous Virus in this Infectious Thriller
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, even the worst of people can do surprising, good things…
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox
Directed by: Elia Kazan
We see them all the time, no matter what decade you watch: The film opens with a pathogen having wiped out millions and bringing civilization to a crashing halt. The Last Man on Earth, The Masque of the Red Death, No Blade of Grass, The Omega Man; there’s an embarrassing number of films where disease just pops up and leaves only a handful of folks left.
Some people might assume that that just has to be the case, because a film about doctors successfully working with government on the ground to contain an outbreak doesn’t have any way of making for an interesting movie. We watch the after effects of an outbreak because stopping the disease beforehand doesn’t have a lot of potential drama.
Well-l-l-l-l…
We open after the credits on a card game above a night spot in New Orleans. The game is breaking up as one of the players, Kochak (Lewis Charles in an uncredited role) says he’s too sick, and gets up to leave. His cousin Poldi (an uncredited Guy Tomajan) is desperate to keep him playing, because Poldi’s boss Blackie (Jack Palance in his first feature role) doesn’t want him walking away from the table $190 ahead. Blackie orders Poldi and his other henchman, Fitch (Zero Mostel), to keep him from getting away.
After a chase, Blackie shoots Kochak, and orders the body be dumped down at the docks. And with New Orleans being depicted here as a place where nasty things happen to folks almost every day, the coroner assumes that this victim died of gunshot wounds… until he gets a closer look at the body…
This forces a call to USPHS, which calls in from his day off Lt. Commander Doctor ‘Clint’ Reed (Richard Widmark). Despite being cranky at being called into the office, even though he can barely relax around his wife Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes) and son Tommy (an uncredited Tommy Retting in his first feature), he comes in to take a look, and finds that Kochak didn’t come to New Orleans a healthy man.
Clint shares his findings with the mayor and city officials: Kochak was a carrier of pneumonic plague, a disease which is highly communicable and quite deadly. He brings up an outbreak of the disease in Los Angeles in 1924 to exemplify how bad things are likely to get if they don’t find everyone “patient zero” came into contact with.
Convinced of how serious Clint is about trying to find any potential vectors of the disease, thanks to the doctor’s first-hand experience with such outbreaks, Mayor Murray (an uncredited H. Walter Fowler Jr. in his only listed role) assigns NYPO Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) the task of finding anyone Kochak encountered and bringing them in. Clint stays close to Warren, which starts to cramp the policeman’s style (among other things) in a working relationship that would come to define most “buddy cop” films for years to come…
Initially, the idea is to keep news about the possible infection on the low-down, to avoid a mass exodus from the city and possible spread of the disease on a national level. Which helps, especially when Blackie, unaware of the possible plague, tries to keep his gang from leaving town. In his mind, the sudden police interest in everyone makes him suspicious of Podi, as he believes that Kochak came in with contraband, and thinks the dead man’s cousin is holding out on him.
This sets up three major players working hard to get what they want before the end of the film: We have the government and law, trying to find anyone who might be a carrier of the plague. We have the bad guys, who greedily search town for what they think is loot, not realizing that the only treasure they’re likely to ‘gain’ from their pigeons is disease. And, we have the plague, ready and waiting to do worse things than those written up by William H McNeill and Jared Diamond…
There’s something of an unavoidable spoiler here: Yes, they get the disease under control before it wipes out at least Louisiana. But there’s still considerable tension before we get there, thanks to the cast that keeps our attention as they move things forward. Palance’s turn as an intense, charismatic hoodlum who goes with a charm offensive before he has to hurt someone made him a breakout star. Widmark tells stories of how Palance would throw himself into the work, doing his own stunts and beating up Mostel off-set between takes to get into character, making Palance the only man Widmark was ever physically afraid of.
(And remember, Widmark is the guy who played a killer that threw an old woman down a set of stairs in Kiss of Death, so…)
Kazan didn’t just let his new discovery run away with the pic, however. Everyone before the camera, from principal stars to uncredited walk-ons (including about 130 speaking parts in the film that were all locals, making this a major production mounted in New Orleans years before Louisiana established a film commission), gives their best to the director. Combined with Kazan’s noir sensibility and emulation of aspects of Italian neorealism, his film carries an intense street-level focus as we watch a cat-and-mouse game being played with such high stakes.
Which is probably important to note “rodents” and “stakes” here, as two years later Kazan would give his infamous testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film came before he notoriously ‘sold out’ his stage collaborators, so whether this makes it easier to view if you haven’t forgiven him, that’s up to you.
The bigger question as to why to look at the film might be: Is this really a genre pic? The fantastic elements are close to nonexistent here, and the pathology of the disease is fairly mundane. The film could even be considered a gangster-crime drama that just happens to have the threat of plague as a McGuffin, with fans of this genre embracing it whole-heartedly.
And yet, the film does share many aspects with other “threatening disease” films as Outbreak and Contagion, both of which can trace their vibe and some of their story elements to this film. And the fact that there are plenty of more readily accepted genre films such as The Andromeda Strain and Rabid that deal with keeping an epidemic in check that also show strains of some of Panic on the Street’s genetic code, makes a strong argument for being among the sub-set of genre films built around a spreading infection, if not one of the more important films among such a class.
The “patient zero” of such works, if you will…
NEXT TIME: Looking back, it might have been better for everyone if this had stayed corked and in the bottle…
