kijii This movie garnered an Oscar for Edna and Edward Anhalt's writing of the original story for a motion picture. And, WHAT a great idea for a story this is--even today. It was shot completely on location in what used to be a truly great and important gulf port city, New Orleans, Louisiana. This movie ingeniously teams up a crotchety, skeptical policeman (Paul Douglas) with a totally devoted doctor (Richard Widmark) from the US Public Health Service, a regular branch of the service that doesn't get enough attention for ITS service to our country. Here, we get to see Widmark as the good guy for a change. He is workaholic family man— struggling to make ends meet--who doesn't have enough time for wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) and his young son.As the movie opens, we see a group of gangsters playing cards in some cheap hotel room. Blackie (Jack Palance) is the boss of the gang, Fitch (Zero Mosel) is his go-for guy, and Poldi (Guy Thomajan) is another gang member. When Poldi's cousin wants to drop out of the card game because he is sick, Blackie doesn't want him to leave since he is too far ahead in the game. When he does leave, the gang chases him though the city and down to the train tracks where he is shot and left. The police discover his body the next day and have it taken to the Coroner's office for an autopsy.... We first get to know Lieutenant Commander Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) and his family in the next scene. 'Clint' and his wife, Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes), have money problems (and bill collectors) which worry them. But, right now, Clint is trying to take some time off from work to spend it his young son who he hardly ever sees because of his job...When the coroner's autopsy reveals that the man's body is loaded with pneumonic plague---a disease related to bubonic plague but more serious since it can be so easily contracted from sneezing, sputum, or simple contact--the Coroner's office calls in Clint to handle the possible effects of a ravaging plague epidemic. Clint immediately calls for help from the NOPD. He needs them to help quickly find, and contain, the source of the plague before it spreads.Clint is teamed with a cynical Police Captain, Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who doesn't care much for doctors or Navy men. (In fact, though Clint's uniform may look like that of a Navy officer, the US Public Health Service and the Navy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.) Tom and Clint soon learn to work together as they realize each other's roles in the almost impossible mission of finding where the dead man came from while keeping their search 'under wraps' to prevent any possible panic. Added to the difficulty of finding where the dead man came from is the fact that his body, and therefore the dead man's ID, was immediately incinerated to prevent contagion. Also, they have to work fast since the incubation period is only 48 hours.As Clint and Tom chase down clues, they are eventually led to a restaurant in a Greek neighborhood. They find out that the restaurant owner's wife had suddenly died of a high fever. This brings them closer to the plague's source than they had ever been; it brings them close to where Poldi in now lying sick in his mother's apartment. Poldi's mother had ordered a nurse, who had reported his symptoms to a local hospital and ordered an ambulance.On the other hand, when Blackie and Fitch find Poldi, they believe that he and his cousin had been into something with a VERY big payoff. (After all—in their minds--why else wold the whole police department be looking SO hard to find Poldi and his cousin?) Blackie assumes that Poldi's cousin must have been in on a huge drug haul and Poldi must know about it. They try to pump Poldi for information before he dies. But, he is too sick to tell them anything. As Blackie and Fitch try to carry Poldi out of his mother's upstairs apartment, they meet Clint and Tom on the steps, throw Poldi down the steps, and are chased by the police.The final running foot-chase sequence, with the police in hot pursuit of Blackie and Fitch, is one of the best of it kind in film noir! The foot-chase takes us to the docks and in the warehouses and back streets of New Orleans. The two gangsters are seen on the levees, structures, and substructures of the once-famous gulf port city.The noir shots of Blackie and Fitch (Palance and Mosel) running across structures, popping up and dropping down from one level of a coffee and banana warehouse to another is almost visually poetic. In fact, they remind us of rats crawling along beams, bridges and other structures (occasionally falling in the swampy water only to get up and run some more). The rat analogy reminds us of the plague that ships sometime bring into ports and refocuses us on WHY the two are being chased in the first place: to stop and control an possible plague epidemic. After Fitch has been shot dead, the final rat-plague analogy is brought home as we see Blackie climbing a fruit freighter's line. He falls to his death, not by a bullet from the police, but by the line's rat catcher.

ppilf A very good movie directed by the talented Elia Kazan. There were a few non-professional actors, and a bit of the script and scenes seem a little corny, even amateurish, but overall, the directing, film editing, sound, camera work, and production were great. The overall story itself was also very good, maybe just a tiny bit over the top for film noir. But the acting performances by Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tommy Cook, Zero Mostel, and the other professional actors were all great.Now for the real attraction. I thought Jack Palance was outstanding in this film, which was his feature film debut. Although the character he played ("Blackie") was a very bad (but smart) criminal, and he didn't have a lot of scenes, Palance's acting performance was fantastic. There are several scenes in this movie that are now on my all-time favorites list because of Palance's presence. I liked Palance in the "City Slickers" films, especially the sequel, but I never realized that he was such a talented actor in his early years. This film made me a Jack Palance fan, and I began buying early films that he was in.

classicsoncall Not every black and white melodrama from the Fifties needs to be considered a noir film; that designation doesn't work for me here. Nor does the title actually, because there's really never any panic to speak of except in the feverish race by authorities to find the source of pneumonic plague brought into the country by a stowaway on a cargo ship. For what it is though, there are some intermittent thrills as Dr. Clint Reed (Richard Widmark) and Police Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) combine forces to methodically pinpoint the the cause of the infection and bring those responsible to light.The one to keep your eyes on here is gangster Blackie, 'Walter' Jack Palance in his big screen debut. Almost gangly in comparison to his later film roles, Palance brings a hostile malice to his character that seethes in every scene he's in. Which made it almost comical to me why he seemed so determined to pin down subordinate Poldi (Guy Thomajan) for some undetermined loot that he thought cousin Kochak smuggled into the country (it turned out to be perfume!). You knew Blackie could play rough, but I never expected to see him throw Poldi over the stairwell with his mother watching - yikes!Richard Widmark's character takes charge right from the start after he's called in from his day off as a naval medical officer. The picture juxtaposes his high pressure job requirements with a serene home life, but he always exhibits an intensity throughout, even as his wife tries to keep him grounded in family responsibilities. Funny, but every time I saw Barbara Bel Geddes I couldn't help thinking of June Cleaver waiting for Wally and the Beaver to come walking through the door any minute.The finale was a pretty realistic nail biter considering how Palance, Mostel and Widmark had to maneuver their way around those slick pilings under the warehouse dock. I was expecting one of them to lose their balance and go completely in the drink, and had to wonder whether they did that all in one take. I never doubted Palance's athleticism though, after watching him maneuver his way up the tow line of the docked ship in port. The film makers really put him through the wringer for his very first picture.

Rodrigo Amaro Lt. Cmdr. Clinton (Richard Widmark) is a military doctor who has the ungrateful duty of tracking down the killers of a mysterious foreign man who carried a deadly plague and now this disease might be spreading around the city, and Clinton must find everybody who had contact with the deceased in less than 48 hours before the news and the disease cause panic in the streets. Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" is a good and original story at the time of its release about the difficulties of medical, political and law enforcement institutions in their mission of controlling things before they get out of control. In the story, Widmark's character not only has to find these guys, but he has to deal with bureaucracy among politics, journalists who sees in this case a great story to be published and that might alarm the people in a bad way, and the only help he's gonna get is with some people in the crowd who might have known the mysterious man, and help of a chief of police (Paul Douglas) who's not much cooperative at first so it's gonna take time to solve things but they don't have enough time to fulfill their task.The treatment given to the story wasn't too much interesting with its division of characters and situations. The chase for the "infecteds" was the most thrilling and interesting part of the plot; while the others involving Clinton's family and the bad guys played by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, almost dragged the film into a boring and tiresome experience. Looking at the film in its surface it's very plausible but with some arguable problems. These guys are out there, they had contact the infected man, they walk to several places, talk to other people and they're spreading the plague, so how come only they had the disease and almost no one else does it too? I mean, the script was too much light and positive (yeah, I know it's the 1950's so they couldn't be so depressive showing that a disease could devastate a whole city), it wasn't realistic enough in this matter and it should be. People complain about the energetic "Outbreak" (1995) but that was a more effective film than this one, it had action, suspense, and also a run against the clock in order to stop a disease that was killing thousands of people. The climatic ending was great, with a long chase in the docks; and some dialog exchange between Douglas and Widmark was brilliant, funny and thoughtful. For what it tends to do it is a very good film and nothing more than that. But we know that Kazan has better works than this. 7/10