Neglected noir: Panic in the Streets (1950) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
If Panic in the Streets is overshadowed now by the two Elia Kazan movies that followed shortly afterwards — A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and then On the Waterfront (1954) — it suffered no such comparisons on its release, and indeed managed to scoop an Academy Award (in the now-defunct Story category).
Today, of course, that story is not as shocking as it might have been in 1950. After AIDS, after Ebola, after the hordes of zombies and smaller number of epidemic thrillers (Outbreak, Contagion, etcetera) that these fears spawned onto the screen, Panic’s tale of an upright New Orleans public-health official — a very young Richard Widmark — trying to prevent plague from spreading through and beyond his city might seem charmingly naive.
After all, even if its Patient Zero is a foreign sailor (no great surprise in the midst of the Second Red Scare), the baddies here are not governments or sinister pharma corporations but traditional hoodlums who seem to belong to an earlier era of film-making, led by Jack Palance (credited as “Walter Jack Palance”) in a decidedly 30s-Cagney manner and also including a startlingly youthful Zero Mostel (who knew he was ever less than middle-aged?).
Exactly how the baddies become set against the plague-vaccination effort is something of an…
