Panic in the Streets

The thugs who corner the runaway gambler in the opening sequence of Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets scurry like rats in the shadows of humid, grimy New Orleans, establishing an atmosphere of uncleanliness that will penetrate the duration of the film. Playing a “good guy” after a string of villainous roles that cemented his reputation as a master of psychosis, Richard Widmark stars as Lieutenant Commander Clint Reed, a medical doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service who must urgently take the lead on containing an outbreak of “pneumatic plague,” just identified in the corpse of a Slavic foreigner who recently entered the port illegally. In his film debut, Jack Palance plays Blackie, the sleazy gangster who killed the infected man after a poker game brawl and who’s now planning to skip town, while Barbara Bel Geddes plays Reed’s wife Nancy whose primary job seems to be to keep her husband calm. Led by Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), police and public health officials burrow deep into the New Orleans underground to investigate patient zero’s interactions, making Blackie and his thugs (Zero Mostel, Guy Thonajan, Tommy Cook) not only desperate for escape but suspicious of one another. With lots of visually stunning sequences, such as the final chase through the coffee warehouse and beneath the docks, the film often has a documentary feel to it: Kazan’s emphasis on realism evident in the decrepit buildings and despairing barflies, the camera’s slow panning past intersecting conversations, tinny sound recording in public spaces, streets and alleys chaotic like the Wild West.