Panic in the Streets
by Elia Kazan
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barbara Bel Geddes, Beverly C. Brown, H. Waller Fowler Jr., Paul Douglas, Tommy CookDirector: Elia Kazan
Brand: Twentieth Century Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 96 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-15
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Panic in the Streets
Movie Review: "I'm a citizen and I got rights."
Summary: 5 Stars
That's what a small-time hood says when he's picked up in the dragnet along with all the rest of the crooks in New Orleans. The cop's response (a pun on the phrase "constitutional lawyer"?) is "I think you're a constitutional liar."
The New Orleans cops are looking for whoever killed a man found floating in the water (he was shot). The coroner determines he was either an "Armenian, Czech, or mixed-blood." I wonder how they were able to narrow it down to that group. One of the less scientifically educated cops gets to the point: "Foreigner, huh?"
One more dead foreigner wouldn't bother the local police so much, let alone Richard Widmark as a Navy officer in the Public Health Service, except that this foreigner brought pneumonic plague with him, and may have given it to anyone he had (probably illegal) contact with. The doctor warns that "Anyone who leaves here endangers the entire country." He won't let the police captain tell the local newspapers about the plague outbreak because he's afraid the killers will run if alerted, taking the plague to other parts of the country, where it might be impossible to contain.
The plague was "obviously smuggled into the country." It couldn't have originated here. Only the dark and sweaty people who make their living from the port get infected by the killers running from the police. Not one "white" American comes down with the plague. Maybe they have a natural immunity inherited from Plymouth Rock.
The public health officer knows how dangerous a threat this is: "I've seen this disease work. It can spread all over the country."
The authorities trace the infection to a particular ship whose captain wasn't careful enough about the kind of stowaways he took money from. The crew is "sure these two men got on in Oran." It may be coincidence that director Elia Kazan's plague-bearers come from the same seaport Albert Camus set his recent novel The Plague in. Camus's plague represents fascism, but what disease is Kazan (a Greek-Turkish immigrant himself) warning postwar America about?
We're not sure what we should be afraid of exactly, except that foreigners are bringing it.
Watching the Navy doctor (Richard Widmark) arguing with the police captain (Paul Douglas - - one of those actors everybody recognizes but nobody can name) reminds you of Marlon Brando and Karl Malden in Kazan's movie made four years later, On the Waterfront (1954). The doctor and the cop, like the boxer and the priest, disagree on most things, but ultimately they find out they're on the same side.
On the Waterfront (the story of a reluctant informer against racketeers) was partly a justification of Kazan's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, for which many never forgave him (witness the protests when he got an Oscar in 1999). Ironically, Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950) was one of Zero Mostel's last films before he was blacklisted from movies for refusing to testify against fellow leftists. Mostel started working in films again fifteen years later when he starred in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (an appropriate title, when you think about it).
If the police captain (himself descended from English-speaking immigrants, we're sure) and the public health officer understood the people they live among better, they would have found the source of the plague sooner. Nobody trusts them enough to tell them what they know. Or, as the captain puts it, "If I knew what shish-kabob was . . ." (One of the captain's junior officers tells him what shish-kabob is.) But even in his ignorance, at least the captain understands that he's dealing with people.
You get the impression that to the doctor, sources of infection (whether biological or ideological) are just points on a graph where x meets y. He cares about populations, not people. The doctor takes pleasure in inoculating the captain, but usually leaves the actual treatment of people who've been exposed to the plague to flunkies.
The captain wants to warn the city, so people in "the community" - - the people he's responsible for - - can take steps to protect themselves. The doctor says "We're all in a community. The same one." (The federal government's perspective is just a mirror image of its Cold War enemy.) The doctor is willing to risk the inhabitants of New Orleans to keep the plague contained. His responsibility isn't to individual citizens, but to the country (or is it just the government?) as a whole. Stalin, still alive when this movie was made, would have understood the doctor's choice. "One death is a tragedy. A million are a statistic."
Summary of Panic in the Streets
An entire city faces death when an illegal alien with bubonic plague is killed and nobody can find the now infectious murderer. Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 03/15/2005 Starring: Paul Douglas Richard Widmark Run time: 96 minutes Rating: Nr Director: Elia KazanSimilar DVD Movies
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