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A killer out of the past—loose amongst eight million people
I cannot explain to you what market forces in 1950 drove the production of two separate Hollywood thrillers intertwining criminal activity with pandemic disease, but TCM ran them as a double feature, so I watched them from my current vantage point of the couch because what else is a person supposed to do when they're sick? If you've ever wondered about a film noir version of Contagion (2011), look no further. You got your choice of pneumonic plague in New Orleans or smallpox in New York. I don't think it's a spoiler to say you really don't want either one of these things.
Elia Kazan brings the Black Death to the Big Easy with Panic in the Streets (1950), an A-picture feast of location shooting with the soul of a health-and-safety PSA; it isn't a docudrama, having been fabricated by divers hands including Kazan's from an Oscar-winning story by husband-and-wife screenwriters Edna and Edward Anhalt, but it wants to be mistaken for one. Richard Widmark stars in a rare interlude of menschlichkeit as Dr. Clint Reed of the United States Public Health Service, a recent transplant to New Orleans who's just trying to enjoy his first day off in forever with his wife and kid (Barbara Bel Geddes and Tommy Rettig) when he gets a call about "something funny" in the autopsy of a dockside John Doe; griping one minute about backwaters that get their shorts in a twist over everything they can't immediately diagnose, the next he's behaving like a plague doctor of the fourteenth century, ordering the dead man cremated on the spot and everything that touched him sterilized or burned and haranguing the authorities so frantically that now he sounds like the one having a "crisis." "Our reports show the man died with two bullet wounds in him," NOPD Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) repeats doggedly at an emergency briefing with the Mayor, but that doesn't change the fact that the other thing he had in him when he died was Yersinia pestis. In its pulmonary form that does not rely on animal vectors, it's as contagious as a cold, comes on faster than the flu, and its mortality rate if untreated is nearly one hundred percent. Nor, in this modern, global age, can it be left to blow over or burn itself out: "Anybody that leaves here can be in any city in the country within ten hours. I could leave here today and be in Africa tomorrow and whatever disease I had would go with me." The city has antibiotics on its side, but not time—the short incubation period gives Reed and Warren no more than forty-eight hours to find the dead man's murderers, now unsuspecting vectors themselves. They form a bristling buddy-cop duo and set out to search from ground zero of a dumped, anonymous body, encountering inertia and interference from the underworld and legitimate citizens every step of the way. Everyone has reasons not to talk to the police, or even to a health inspector; our heroes waste half their time clashing anyway, the abrasive, impatient doctor bringing out the obstruction in the slow-and-steady cop, both men feeling mutually unappreciated and overrun. You're pretty sure New Orleans isn't going to get trashed by a medieval plague just because two dudes couldn't get out of the way of their own dick-measuring, but you can't swear to it. Reed when faced with a recalcitrant witness doesn't scruple to use the threat of a feverish, suffocating death to start the man singing, stick-and-carroting him with a syringeful of streptomycin: "Look, sailor, this is the only hypodermic I've got and it breaks very easily! Now start talking or you're going to get into trouble!" This story is, despite its benevolent government credentials, a noir.
Even more noir than the flaws of this film's good guys are the ironies that govern its bad guys' lives. In the ordinary course of things, the law wouldn't care less about this particular victim—a no-name lowlife, an undocumented immigrant who got himself bumped off by a sore loser in one of the natural consequences of back-room poker games on Bourbon Street. But because the authorities are mounting such an effort to find and identify the man and all his associates, sore-loser-in-chief Blackie ("Walter" Jack Palance in his film debut, all meanness and cheekbones) becomes convinced the sickly stranger he didn't think twice about snuffing must have been mixed up in something big, something that will really pay off if he can figure it out before the cops do, and so he drags his confederates, world-class shvitzer Fitch (a temporarily de-blacklisted Zero Mostel) and Poldi who's looking a bit off-color lately (Guy Thomajan), into a violently parallel quest for the booby prize of all time, the death you go looking for. It's a testament to the tightness of the script that it doesn't feel totally contrived that the two groups don't cross paths until late in the third act, at which point the narrative flips into pure chase scene for the twenty minutes remaining; neither does it feel like sightseeing, since Joe MacDonald's contrast-sensitive cinematography emphasizes working-class, getting-by New Orleans over tourist decadence or criminal exotica—railyards and wharfsides, dive bars and laundromats, Greek restaurants and seaman's hiring halls, a tramp steamer out in the Gulf of Mexico and a coffee warehouse on the banks of the Mississippi. Some of the best shots in the movie are simply of the skyline, the flat water and the flat land. I am skeptical about the accents of the principals, but I'd like to rewatch it sometime with an ear to the extras. And if the main cast is whiter than I think of the norm for New Orleans, at least the world through which they move is racially mixed, matter-of-fact about its cosmopolitan ethnicities and languages, which is nice to see in a movie whose doomsday clock started ticking with the death of a plague-carrying foreigner involved in some shady trade. When Warren seizes on a taste for shish kebab as a clue to the origins of the index case, one of his whitebread subordinates points out that he rather likes the dish himself. The conjoined metaphors of plague and crime pay off not with an influx of immigrants but an all-American gangster trying to escape the country, swarming a ship's mooring line like a six-foot-four rat and meeting with the same obstacles. It's a great piece of stunt work and an equally effective anticlimax: "Now we got to fish him out." The closing minutes restore domesticity in the most mid-century American fashion possible short of a fishing trip, but we have been reminded once again of what a thin and microbially permeable shell it is.
Earl McEvoy's The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) is an altogether pulpier piece of celluloid, which may be why I like it better. Completed in tandem with Panic in the Streets but shelved for six months so as not to compete with the more prestigious picture, it is ostensibly a dramatization of the real-life outbreak of smallpox that struck New York City in the spring of 1947—the screenplay by Harry Essex gives story credit to Milton Lehman for his similarly titled, nonfiction article in Cosmopolitan in 1948—but really it's a double-tracked manhunt whose grim joke is that neither the T-men on the trail of a diamond smuggler nor the "health detectives" tracing the vector of a deadly virus realize they're looking for the same person, but then again neither does the person herself. The credits fade up over an ominous silhouette of a wild-haired woman with a gun in her hand, looming above the skyline of New York like Death in a medieval engraving. After a brief, panoramic prologue, the exquisitely hardboiled tones of Reed Hadley zero us in on the three-dimensional source of that fateful shadow, a blonde woman stepping off a streamliner at Penn Station with a silver brooch pinned to her coat and a fine sheen of sweat on her otherwise well-modeled face. We are primed to expect a murder spree, perhaps sociopathy, perhaps just singleminded revenge. "Oh, no," the narrator informs us with bitter nicety, "she didn't deal death out of the end of a gun or off the point of a knife. She delivered it wholesale. Just by walking through a crowd—climbing some stairs—pushing through a turnstile—standing in the station. Better than wholesale. For free. No charge." Stylish and headachy, Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes) thinks she has only the normal problems of a film noir protagonist: $50,000 worth of Cuban diamonds to fence, a cheating and then some husband to settle a score with. She dodged the customs officer with a neat bit of bribery at the Hotel America. The free clinic near Times Square assured her she had "nothing serious." But every touch, every interaction with her fellow New Yorkers, from a purchase at a newsstand to a drink from a public fountain to an unwanted kiss from a pushy barman, passes on the contraband she didn't intend to bring in, and while it takes the doctors (William Bishop, Dorothy Malone, Ludwig Donath) a little time to comprehend exactly what's sprung up like an ancient specter in their super-modern metropolis, soon enough it's frighteningly clear that the city is facing widening rings of contagion and a patient zero still at large. The first order of suspense is direct and medical: whether the doctors or the law will find Sheila before she dies and/or slips the bounds of the Big Apple, which is doing its government-supported best to keep an outbreak from becoming an epidemic. The second is noir but good: whether Sheila, increasingly weakened and fever-racked, her skin finally beginning to show the ugly, characteristic rash that would have given her illness away at once, will stay alive to get her vengeance before the variola takes her down.
Because I complain so often about the Hollywood tendency to punch up history in order to get audiences to believe it, I have to acknowledge that Killer suffers from the same cinematic inflation. In real life, the rapidity with which the city mobilized for mass vaccination actually managed to limit the spread of the disease to twelve confirmed cases of virulent smallpox, only two of whom died; the movie's death toll is at least twice that and one of them is a heartwrenching little girl with whom Sheila shared a maternal moment at the clinic. More egregiously, in reality the combined efforts of the U.S. Public Health Service and the New York City Department of Health successfully vaccinated more than six million New Yorkers despite initial shortfalls in the number of units needed. At no point did the vaccine run out and cause the mass panic that drives the tough third-act showdown of the movie's Mayor of New York (Roy Roberts) with recalcitrant pharmaceutical executives. It's cute that the script elsewhere reproduces factual touches like the mayor having to be pulled out of a neighborhood baseball game to receive the bad news about the outbreak ("No one told smallpox it's Sunday") or the widely broadcast slogan "Be safe, be sure, be vaccinated," but I never like the kind of retelling that rests its tension on made-up incompetence; I am always more interested when everyone is accurately good at their jobs and it's still a close thing. I do like the half-documentary, half-animistic way DP Joseph Biroc shoots his native city, making it simultaneously a record of places now lost or altered—the Bowery, the Battery, the Third Avenue El—and an entity in its own right, a sickness in its steel and concrete veins. There's one astonishing pan out from a tenement fire escape across a cemetery strung with lines of washing whose location I would love to know simply because it's such an arresting image, sheets and shirts flapping above the graves. Los Angeles substitutes for NYC only at the climax, presumably because the facade of the Bradbury Building was too good a setting for an almost-jump to lose. I have never seen Whit Bissell in a movie for more than five to ten minutes all told, but he keeps catching my attention, partly because his voice is so much deeper and more authoritative than his surprisingly delicate face with its long folding lines and arched brows; he seems to have been typed as officials and nerds, often weak links—a fragile prisoner in Brute Force (1947), a pushover bank clerk in Side Street (1949)—but I like him here as the heroine's estranged brother, a flophouse manager who says quietly of his disappointing profession, "It gives me an address and I can sleep nights." He falls easily into the old defensive fights with his sister when she turns up exhausted and sweating at his door, but he gives her a place to stay without asking questions and only stops covering for her with the authorities ("I didn't think doctors went in for third degrees") when it's borne in on him that her life is in danger. Above all I like Keyes, who got my permanent interest with The Prowler (1951) and reinforced it with 99 River Street (1953). Her hard-etched, weary determination keeps Sheila Bennet real even as her illness and narrowing options turn her into an angel of death in truth, defying her own to secure someone else's. The tragedy is not that "she didn't know she was Death," as the nameless narrator would have it; it's that she only ever wanted to kill one person and she didn't even need to do that in the end.
I don't know if there is a moral to be drawn from this double feature beyond the importance of vaccination and coordinated rapid outbreak response, but I happen to think that's a good one. Have you had your flu shot, now that it's autumn? Herd immunity is a thing. Who even knew plague noir was? This transmission brought to you by my catchy backers at Patreon.
Elia Kazan brings the Black Death to the Big Easy with Panic in the Streets (1950), an A-picture feast of location shooting with the soul of a health-and-safety PSA; it isn't a docudrama, having been fabricated by divers hands including Kazan's from an Oscar-winning story by husband-and-wife screenwriters Edna and Edward Anhalt, but it wants to be mistaken for one. Richard Widmark stars in a rare interlude of menschlichkeit as Dr. Clint Reed of the United States Public Health Service, a recent transplant to New Orleans who's just trying to enjoy his first day off in forever with his wife and kid (Barbara Bel Geddes and Tommy Rettig) when he gets a call about "something funny" in the autopsy of a dockside John Doe; griping one minute about backwaters that get their shorts in a twist over everything they can't immediately diagnose, the next he's behaving like a plague doctor of the fourteenth century, ordering the dead man cremated on the spot and everything that touched him sterilized or burned and haranguing the authorities so frantically that now he sounds like the one having a "crisis." "Our reports show the man died with two bullet wounds in him," NOPD Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) repeats doggedly at an emergency briefing with the Mayor, but that doesn't change the fact that the other thing he had in him when he died was Yersinia pestis. In its pulmonary form that does not rely on animal vectors, it's as contagious as a cold, comes on faster than the flu, and its mortality rate if untreated is nearly one hundred percent. Nor, in this modern, global age, can it be left to blow over or burn itself out: "Anybody that leaves here can be in any city in the country within ten hours. I could leave here today and be in Africa tomorrow and whatever disease I had would go with me." The city has antibiotics on its side, but not time—the short incubation period gives Reed and Warren no more than forty-eight hours to find the dead man's murderers, now unsuspecting vectors themselves. They form a bristling buddy-cop duo and set out to search from ground zero of a dumped, anonymous body, encountering inertia and interference from the underworld and legitimate citizens every step of the way. Everyone has reasons not to talk to the police, or even to a health inspector; our heroes waste half their time clashing anyway, the abrasive, impatient doctor bringing out the obstruction in the slow-and-steady cop, both men feeling mutually unappreciated and overrun. You're pretty sure New Orleans isn't going to get trashed by a medieval plague just because two dudes couldn't get out of the way of their own dick-measuring, but you can't swear to it. Reed when faced with a recalcitrant witness doesn't scruple to use the threat of a feverish, suffocating death to start the man singing, stick-and-carroting him with a syringeful of streptomycin: "Look, sailor, this is the only hypodermic I've got and it breaks very easily! Now start talking or you're going to get into trouble!" This story is, despite its benevolent government credentials, a noir.
Even more noir than the flaws of this film's good guys are the ironies that govern its bad guys' lives. In the ordinary course of things, the law wouldn't care less about this particular victim—a no-name lowlife, an undocumented immigrant who got himself bumped off by a sore loser in one of the natural consequences of back-room poker games on Bourbon Street. But because the authorities are mounting such an effort to find and identify the man and all his associates, sore-loser-in-chief Blackie ("Walter" Jack Palance in his film debut, all meanness and cheekbones) becomes convinced the sickly stranger he didn't think twice about snuffing must have been mixed up in something big, something that will really pay off if he can figure it out before the cops do, and so he drags his confederates, world-class shvitzer Fitch (a temporarily de-blacklisted Zero Mostel) and Poldi who's looking a bit off-color lately (Guy Thomajan), into a violently parallel quest for the booby prize of all time, the death you go looking for. It's a testament to the tightness of the script that it doesn't feel totally contrived that the two groups don't cross paths until late in the third act, at which point the narrative flips into pure chase scene for the twenty minutes remaining; neither does it feel like sightseeing, since Joe MacDonald's contrast-sensitive cinematography emphasizes working-class, getting-by New Orleans over tourist decadence or criminal exotica—railyards and wharfsides, dive bars and laundromats, Greek restaurants and seaman's hiring halls, a tramp steamer out in the Gulf of Mexico and a coffee warehouse on the banks of the Mississippi. Some of the best shots in the movie are simply of the skyline, the flat water and the flat land. I am skeptical about the accents of the principals, but I'd like to rewatch it sometime with an ear to the extras. And if the main cast is whiter than I think of the norm for New Orleans, at least the world through which they move is racially mixed, matter-of-fact about its cosmopolitan ethnicities and languages, which is nice to see in a movie whose doomsday clock started ticking with the death of a plague-carrying foreigner involved in some shady trade. When Warren seizes on a taste for shish kebab as a clue to the origins of the index case, one of his whitebread subordinates points out that he rather likes the dish himself. The conjoined metaphors of plague and crime pay off not with an influx of immigrants but an all-American gangster trying to escape the country, swarming a ship's mooring line like a six-foot-four rat and meeting with the same obstacles. It's a great piece of stunt work and an equally effective anticlimax: "Now we got to fish him out." The closing minutes restore domesticity in the most mid-century American fashion possible short of a fishing trip, but we have been reminded once again of what a thin and microbially permeable shell it is.
Earl McEvoy's The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) is an altogether pulpier piece of celluloid, which may be why I like it better. Completed in tandem with Panic in the Streets but shelved for six months so as not to compete with the more prestigious picture, it is ostensibly a dramatization of the real-life outbreak of smallpox that struck New York City in the spring of 1947—the screenplay by Harry Essex gives story credit to Milton Lehman for his similarly titled, nonfiction article in Cosmopolitan in 1948—but really it's a double-tracked manhunt whose grim joke is that neither the T-men on the trail of a diamond smuggler nor the "health detectives" tracing the vector of a deadly virus realize they're looking for the same person, but then again neither does the person herself. The credits fade up over an ominous silhouette of a wild-haired woman with a gun in her hand, looming above the skyline of New York like Death in a medieval engraving. After a brief, panoramic prologue, the exquisitely hardboiled tones of Reed Hadley zero us in on the three-dimensional source of that fateful shadow, a blonde woman stepping off a streamliner at Penn Station with a silver brooch pinned to her coat and a fine sheen of sweat on her otherwise well-modeled face. We are primed to expect a murder spree, perhaps sociopathy, perhaps just singleminded revenge. "Oh, no," the narrator informs us with bitter nicety, "she didn't deal death out of the end of a gun or off the point of a knife. She delivered it wholesale. Just by walking through a crowd—climbing some stairs—pushing through a turnstile—standing in the station. Better than wholesale. For free. No charge." Stylish and headachy, Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes) thinks she has only the normal problems of a film noir protagonist: $50,000 worth of Cuban diamonds to fence, a cheating and then some husband to settle a score with. She dodged the customs officer with a neat bit of bribery at the Hotel America. The free clinic near Times Square assured her she had "nothing serious." But every touch, every interaction with her fellow New Yorkers, from a purchase at a newsstand to a drink from a public fountain to an unwanted kiss from a pushy barman, passes on the contraband she didn't intend to bring in, and while it takes the doctors (William Bishop, Dorothy Malone, Ludwig Donath) a little time to comprehend exactly what's sprung up like an ancient specter in their super-modern metropolis, soon enough it's frighteningly clear that the city is facing widening rings of contagion and a patient zero still at large. The first order of suspense is direct and medical: whether the doctors or the law will find Sheila before she dies and/or slips the bounds of the Big Apple, which is doing its government-supported best to keep an outbreak from becoming an epidemic. The second is noir but good: whether Sheila, increasingly weakened and fever-racked, her skin finally beginning to show the ugly, characteristic rash that would have given her illness away at once, will stay alive to get her vengeance before the variola takes her down.
Because I complain so often about the Hollywood tendency to punch up history in order to get audiences to believe it, I have to acknowledge that Killer suffers from the same cinematic inflation. In real life, the rapidity with which the city mobilized for mass vaccination actually managed to limit the spread of the disease to twelve confirmed cases of virulent smallpox, only two of whom died; the movie's death toll is at least twice that and one of them is a heartwrenching little girl with whom Sheila shared a maternal moment at the clinic. More egregiously, in reality the combined efforts of the U.S. Public Health Service and the New York City Department of Health successfully vaccinated more than six million New Yorkers despite initial shortfalls in the number of units needed. At no point did the vaccine run out and cause the mass panic that drives the tough third-act showdown of the movie's Mayor of New York (Roy Roberts) with recalcitrant pharmaceutical executives. It's cute that the script elsewhere reproduces factual touches like the mayor having to be pulled out of a neighborhood baseball game to receive the bad news about the outbreak ("No one told smallpox it's Sunday") or the widely broadcast slogan "Be safe, be sure, be vaccinated," but I never like the kind of retelling that rests its tension on made-up incompetence; I am always more interested when everyone is accurately good at their jobs and it's still a close thing. I do like the half-documentary, half-animistic way DP Joseph Biroc shoots his native city, making it simultaneously a record of places now lost or altered—the Bowery, the Battery, the Third Avenue El—and an entity in its own right, a sickness in its steel and concrete veins. There's one astonishing pan out from a tenement fire escape across a cemetery strung with lines of washing whose location I would love to know simply because it's such an arresting image, sheets and shirts flapping above the graves. Los Angeles substitutes for NYC only at the climax, presumably because the facade of the Bradbury Building was too good a setting for an almost-jump to lose. I have never seen Whit Bissell in a movie for more than five to ten minutes all told, but he keeps catching my attention, partly because his voice is so much deeper and more authoritative than his surprisingly delicate face with its long folding lines and arched brows; he seems to have been typed as officials and nerds, often weak links—a fragile prisoner in Brute Force (1947), a pushover bank clerk in Side Street (1949)—but I like him here as the heroine's estranged brother, a flophouse manager who says quietly of his disappointing profession, "It gives me an address and I can sleep nights." He falls easily into the old defensive fights with his sister when she turns up exhausted and sweating at his door, but he gives her a place to stay without asking questions and only stops covering for her with the authorities ("I didn't think doctors went in for third degrees") when it's borne in on him that her life is in danger. Above all I like Keyes, who got my permanent interest with The Prowler (1951) and reinforced it with 99 River Street (1953). Her hard-etched, weary determination keeps Sheila Bennet real even as her illness and narrowing options turn her into an angel of death in truth, defying her own to secure someone else's. The tragedy is not that "she didn't know she was Death," as the nameless narrator would have it; it's that she only ever wanted to kill one person and she didn't even need to do that in the end.
I don't know if there is a moral to be drawn from this double feature beyond the importance of vaccination and coordinated rapid outbreak response, but I happen to think that's a good one. Have you had your flu shot, now that it's autumn? Herd immunity is a thing. Who even knew plague noir was? This transmission brought to you by my catchy backers at Patreon.
no subject
That’s.... *really* impressive for a city that size, and I find the diagram of the chain of transmission included in the article rather touching.
no subject
It was amazing! Apparently I am fine with the movie substituting a beautiful diamond smuggler for a middle-aged businesssman and adding a revenge plot, but not with it downplaying how successfully the city managed the outbreak. Especially considering the logistics, the density of the population, and the communicability of the disease, twelve mostly non-fatal cases in a city of eight million is a record worth celebrating, Hollywood!
no subject
no subject
That sounds about right for TV.
(I am disproportionately amused by the show actually being called Medical Investigation. It's like "Title of the Song.")
no subject