Review: One of America's most brilliant film directors was without question Elia Kazan. His directorial genius was not particularly suited to taut thrillers, since Kazan needed more room to breathe and to be slower and more subtle. However, 'Panic in the Streets' is a first-rate social thriller and is if anything more relevant to today than it was to 1950 when it was released. The themes of illegal immigrants, people-smuggling, imminent plagues, rapid transmission around the world of diseases (a worried Richard Widmark says: 'I could be in any American city in ten hours and in Africa tomorrow.'), ethnic isolation and ghettoism are today's concerns more than ever. This film features a spectacular film debut by Jack Palance, and a wonderful performance by Barbara Bel Geddes, two casting strokes of genius. Richard Widmark is allowed not to be a psychopath for once, and is a deeply caring, warmly loving, intense hero of the people. He leads basically a one-man campaign to stop an epidemic of pneumonic plague in New Orleans, struggling to convince sluggish politicians and complacent policemen that there is a problem. There is a race against time to find the small-time crooks who have contracted the plague from a dead illegal immigrant within 48 hours, before the whole city, and as they are always reminding us, the whole country, are endangered with the worst thing since the 1919 flu. One amazing scene where Jack Palance, who is infected, is prevented from climbing aboard a ship by a rat-barrier on the rope is ironic in the extreme, reminding us in the most gruesome terms that humans can be the worst carriers and vermin of all. The highly dramatic chase scenes in what they call 'the coffee factory' at the wharfs rivals the most inventive climax scenes of Hitchcock, and with just as spectacular a setting. Many non-professionals appear in the film, which has the gritty realism of, well, something called reality. Kazan really takes the cameras into places where even people rarely went, and where even rats would have thought twice. This film was a major feat of social realism. If it lacks the electricity of the most highly charged thrillers, it is because Kazan took it so seriously that he could not hype it up, for after all, the threat of plague is serious enough to scare anybody without the need for extra guns and molls. The only unfortunate thing about the film is the title, which gives a false suggestion of superficiality. But Kazan was anything but superficial. He clearly considered this project a public duty, to alert us to genuine possibilities. If only those possibilities had diminished today, but alas, they are getting worse every day. One day, after a worldwide plague, this film may be shown to a few survivors as an example of how an outbreak was contained on film, but its lessons were forgotten.
Now, what is this review like?
OPT:
(A). negative
(B). positive
(B).