Barbara Bel Geddes

Panic in the Streets

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Dr Reed explaining that it's plague

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 … Read more

Caught

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Leonora is consoled by Dr Quinada

Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max OphĂźls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories OphĂźls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more