Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness but facts, reason and the force of argument.
All this wrapped up in a tense, noirish thriller starring Richard Widmark and handing Jack Palance the first of a long string of “mad dog” roles, which he was uniquely suited to playing.
As Soderbergh, so Kazan – realism and immediacy are the key concerns. Panic in the Streets is set in New Orleans, and Kazan really catches that raggedy port atmosphere as his story unspools about a new arrival in the USA who is carrying plague, and the attempts by a government scientist (Widmark) to track down the men who came into contact with him before they unloaded several bullets into his chest over a gambling argument.
Once Widmark’s Dr Reed, of the US Public Health Service, has established that the dead man would have died of plague within hours anyway the race is on to track down anyone who might have come in contact with him, without making a public song and dance about it – Reed worries that if the men who killed plague-carrier Kolchak realise there’s a police operation afoot they’ll skip town and take the disease nationwide.
Those guys are the thuggish Blackie (Palance), his soft-bellied sidekick Fitch (Zero Mostel) and gopher Poldi (Guy Thomajan), not all of whom will make it to the end credits.
Much of the early part of the film is taken up with Reed’s difficulties in persuading the authorities that plague is what they’re dealing with, that it will spread like wildfire if nothing is done, and that everything must be done short of starting a panic. A particularly well cast Paul Douglas plays the embodiment of institutional inertia and doubt, as Captain Warren, the cop working alongside Dr Reed whose journey from hostility to admiration and even friendship is the film’s main emotional arc.
Widmark is also incredibly good as Reed, playing against type to a large extent, that dash of vinegar in his make-up saving Reed as a character from death by sanctimony.
The danger that the film skirts is of characters acting as placeholders for positions – good institutional Reed, bad sceptical Warren and so on – and Kazan and his team of writers pay special attention to fleshing people out. Hence the sometimes tedious side story about Dr Reed and his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes), their money worries and their desire (or not) to have a second child.
Plague as a disease might seem an odd choice, but there had been outbreaks of bubonic plague in San Francisco in the early 20th century, so it was still in living memory, and Albert Camus’s book The Plague had been published only three years earlier and been a roaring success. The fact that Kolchak is suspected of having come from Oran, in Algeria, where Camus set his story, is mentioned only once but it is significant.
Throughout Palance’s Blackie keeps a firm hold of the wrong end of the stick. Once he realises there is a big but largely invisible police operation underway, he becomes convinced that the dead man must have “brought something in”. He has, of course, but it’s not contraband.
Kazan’s reputation never recovered from the drubbing it got after he named names at Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings, but he’s one of the great directors and this is a prime example of how good he was. This film has great pace and bounces along, and thanks to DP Joseph McDonald it looks fantastic too. Much of it, noirishly, is shot at night, and MacDonald squeezes inky blacks, sparkly whites and all the shades in between out of his celluloid.
It’s pretty great in every department, in fact. That central foursome of Palance, Widmark, Douglas and Mostel are particularly a standout and even poor Barbara Bel Geddes does OK, nice, wifely Mrs Reed providing a bit of domestic relief and solid emotional scaffolding.
And if you want to attach an allegory – see Camus – to a story about plague, Panic in the Streets offers that too. It’s immigrants. It’s criminals. It’s communists. Take your pick.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
