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Like Norma Desmond, Actress Swanson worked for Mack Sennett and Cecil B. DeMille (who always called her "young fellow," as he does in the film), and lived in a 25-room mansion off Sunset Boulevard during her heyday in the '20s, when she was an adored and emulated symbol of glamour. Unlike Norma, she made one of her biggest hits (The Trespasser) after sound came in, kept constructively busy during the years that she pined for another screen career. Her role in Sunset Boulevard has already brought her a gnawing problem: How can she top it?
Panic in the Streets (20th Century-Fox) puts an exciting new twist into a thriller about a manhunt in New Orleans. The City's police have just 48 hours to head off a deadly epidemic of pneumonic plague* by finding the unknown and unwitting carrier—a murder accomplice with every reason to stay out of their way.
Scripter Richard Murphy's screenplay skillfully exploits not only a good story idea but a colorful New Orleans background: docks, slums, warehouses, sleazy restaurants, a seaman's hiring hall, the French Market. Director Elia (Boomerang!) Kazan filmed his picture with vigor and imagination. Though authentic settings have become a cinematic commonplace, few directors can match Kazan at filling them with people whose behavior seems equally authentic. The combination of a real city and Kazan's knack for closely observed human detail (e.g., the table manners of a thug pawing at his food) charges the picture with such pungent atmosphere that the moviegoer can all but smell it.
Richard Widmark plays a doctor in the U.S. Public Health Service who signals the manhunt when an autopsy shows that the corpse of an unknown murdered man is full of plague bacilli. He warns the police that the man who dumped the body into the river may also be infected, gives them a deadline based on the disease's incubation period. Skeptically, a police captain (Paul Douglas) sets his men scouring the city. With little to go on, they face the added handicap of keeping the news from the public and avoiding a panicky exodus that might spread the plague all over the U.S. The film builds up a full head of suspense by showing how the murder was committed and then alternating between the progress of the police and the movements of the murderer and his henchmen.
The climactic chase is overlong and a little too ingenious; it gets so bound up with the machinery of a coffee warehouse that it becomes unintentionally funny. Some quiet interludes of Hero Widmark's home life, intended to give him romantic interest and deeper motivation, seem grafted onto the plot and gain nothing from the mannered acting of Barbara Bel Geddes as his wife.
Widmark's role gives him a chance to show the versatility of his considerable talent. Douglas, typecast as the gruff but good cop, delivers his usual sound performance. But moviegoers may be most impressed by Nightclub Comedian Zero Mostel's straight portrayal of a sniveling grifter, and the striking debut of able Villain Walter Palance, a onetime prizefighter with a face like a Halloween mask.
* To spread their talents, Paramount has split the moviemaking partners and is now using them separately.
* The pulmonary (and worst) form of bubonic plague—the medieval Black Death.