Classic Corner: Panic in the Streets

Here is an old movie that speaks presciently to our pandemic present. It’s about a highly communicable disease and a race against time, led by heroic public health officials, to limit its spread. It features airborne transmission and flu-like symptoms; disturbing death and autopsy scenes; and profound spectatorial anxiety keyed up by crowded spaces. Along with this and the ticking-clock narrative structure, dramatic tension is built around the disease’s lethal threat to the sanctified (suburban, white) American family and civic order itself. There is concern that news of the threat will foment panic (which is legitimized); an authority figure’s misuse of his privileged information to get loved ones out of town before said panic ensues (rendered understandable); and a popular skepticism of medical expertise (derided as lowbrow), including a hint of anti-vaccine resistance, that threatens to thwart the heroes’ efforts. And, believe it or not, I’m not talking about Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011).

I’m talking about Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950), about an outbreak of pneumonic plague in New Orleans, based loosely on two real outbreaks of bubonic plague in that city in 1914 and 1919, carried into that gulf port by wharf rats. Now available as part of the Criterion Channel’s “Fox Noir” series, it’s worth checking out, even though it remains a lesser film of the now infamous director—made two years before Kazan “named names” to congressional Red-baiters, and almost fifty years before his Lifetime Achievement Academy Award prompted equal parts jeers and cheers.

At the time of Panic’s release, Kazan was an unambivalently beloved critical darling and sure box office bet of both stage and screen, even before his film masterpieces to come: the screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros., 1951) and On the Waterfront (Horizon Pictures, 1954), both of which contain DNA from Panic’s setting and noir sensibilities. In 1950, Kazan was in his heyday, rounding out a lucrative five year-five film contract with Twentieth-Century Fox. At Fox, his leftist politics were encouraged by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s insistence on “social relevance” in filmmaking, even after the House Un-American Committee’s first hearings into communist infiltration in Hollywood, held in 1947, which precipitated the fall of the Hollywood Left.

Kazan escaped the worst of those first hearings, even though he had briefly joined the Communist Party USA in the mid-1930s, like many left-leaning artists of the Depression era; he left the Party after less than two years, disenchanted by its top-down, inartistic dogmatism. Temporarily, Kazan’s high-profile successes insulated him from the post-WWII Red Scare, even as he continued to imbue his work with leftist criticisms of the American Way. With Fox, he made a smash-hit drama about hard-scrabble tenement life, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945); a ripped-from-the-headlines noir about a wrongly accused war veteran, Boomerang! (1947); and two “social problem” prestige films, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947, for which Kazan collected the Best Director Oscar) and Pinky (1949), about antisemitism and anti-black racism in the U.S. respectively. Between Hollywood shoots, Kazan would return to Broadway to direct the debuts of some of the era’s most important plays, including the aforementioned Streetcar (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949).

A genre hybrid, Panic in the Streets contains a little of everything from Kazan’s oeuvre to that time, cobbling together elements of stage-y domestic drama, social problem films, and noir. It starts with a tracking shot cruising down seedy Bourbon Street over the opening credits. Late at night, in a smoky apartment above a French Quarter jazz club, criminal-types are assembled for a card game. Coughing and feverish, an undocumented Eastern European immigrant named “Kolchak” (Lewis Charles), just “off the boat,” has brought a whiff of pneumonic plague into New Orleans and more than a whiff of xenophobia into the film, which later spreads to Chinese cooks and a Greek restaurateur. Linking immigration to disease – and crime – is a long-enduring trope, all the more shameful for Kazan being a Greek immigrant himself. (And it’s hardly a thing of the past; see the way Contagion links infectious disease to globalism and illicit behavior in Gwyneth Paltrow’s jet-set adulterer, who, like Panic’s Patient Zero Kolchak, also commits her contagion while gambling in Macau and cheating in Chicago.)

Mortally ill, Kolchak makes a more immediately lethal mistake: winning too much money off of underworld kingpin, “Blackie,” played by Jack Palance in his first big-screen appearance. Kazan makes the most of Palance’s debut, lingering on his jaggedly menacing profile, as photogenic in noir’s chiaroscuro lighting as the corrugated metal buildings in New Orleans’ shipyards, to where Blackie’s henchmen chase and then kill Kolchak.

The next day, when the medical examiner discovers more than just bullets in Kolchak’s disease-riddled body, the police have no choice but to call in Doctor Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark), local resident and Lieutenant Commander in the US Public Health Service, extracting him from a hard-earned day off in his sunny suburb, which the film is at pains to present idyllically. We meet Dr. Reed painting a dresser with his adorable young son and bickering, but lovingly, with his aproned and adoring wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) about making ends meet on a civil servant’s salary. Dr. Reed is the picture of wholesome competence and self-sacrifice, much like the public health officials played by Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet in Contagion and much unlike Widmark’s other roles of 1950, i.e., as a frenetic hustler in Night and the City and an unhinged racist opposite Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (both also in Criterion’s Fox Noir offerings).

Not that everyone is impressed by Dr. Reed. In his race to locate Kochak’s killers and other contacts (i.e., potential infectees), he is met with anti-elitist suspicion, particularly in the person of Police Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who initially resents government experts as self-important, and scoffs at Dr. Reed’s military-esque uniform as unearned. Relatedly, there is a brief moment of resistance to Dr. Reed’s “inoculation” shots in the rank-and-file, which is easily overcome by Captain Warren’s growl to roll up their sleeves, “Because the commissioner says so, that’s why!” Panic in the Streets has no truck with anti-vaxxing. Like Contagion, it presumes the heroic nature of vaccine science: Any character given the “anti-plague serum,” an all-powerful antidote and prophylaxis, is saved—a fictional dramatic tool rather than a real medical one, in this case. (To date, there is no widely-available vaccine for the pneumonic plague, a now-rare—especially in the U.S.—bacterial infection.)

Dr. Reed soldiers on, despite the “thick-skull[ed]” skeptics and the risk to Self and Family, emphasized again when Dr. Reed returns home to dispose of his potentially-contaminated clothes in the garage (glancing nervously at his son’s little bicycle) and learns that his wife is pregnant. He ventures into the dangerously infected city, and thus into noir, the dark sensibilities of which are rendered gorgeously by Kazan and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, despite the relatively happy ending and optimism about American institutions. Before that happy ending, which sees Dr. Reed restored safely home, the viewer delves with him into the vice of the French Quarter and the hollowed-out existence of sailors and longshoreman. When Dr. Reed, accompanied by the police, finally catches up with Blackie and his henchmen, a chase through the gloomy shipyards ensues, ending at the docks, where Blackie’s attempt to scurry up a ship’s mooring rope is obstructed by a metal disc “rat guard,” metaphorically enough.
Told more than sixty year earlier than Contagion, Panic in the Streets is likewise a story that ends with the ‘crime’ solved, the contamination (of disease and globalism) contained, and the white and white-collar suburban home restored, assuaging the social anxieties the film has tapped into and exacerbated. What accounts for this storyline’s enduring appeal? Add that to the mounting pile of questions COVID-19 has raised.