The Time Has Come Again for Panic in the Streets

Elia Kazan’s 1950 film about a spreading contagion is especially resonant today.
By Terry Teachout
March 4, 2020 3:03 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal

Carl Goldman, a 67-year-old California radio-station owner, was infected with coronavirus on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Today he is in quarantine in a facility in Omaha run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post called “I Have the Coronavirus. So Far, It Isn’t That Bad” in which he remarked that his quarantine location, which was last used for the 2014 Ebola outbreak, “looked like something out of ‘The Andromeda Strain,’” Robert Wise’s high-tech screen version of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel about a mysterious illness that turns out to have been caused by an extraterrestrial virus.

One of the things about Mr. Goldman’s piece that struck me most forcibly was that he resorted so naturally to a movie-based metaphor to describe his experience. If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to do that fairly often, since the boomers all grew up watching the same “water-cooler movies.” Even the CDC does it: Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, wrote in the Atlantic that “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a pandemic, was “a fair and accurate portrayal of how the public health community might respond to a disease outbreak like the fictional one in the film.”

That was quite an endorsement, especially given the fact that countless such movies, most of them eminently forgettable and deservedly forgotten, have been ground out by Hollywood. (“The Killer That Stalked New York,” anyone?) A few, however, have been rather more noteworthy, among them not only “The Andromeda Strain” and “Contagion,” but Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” (2006) and Wolfgang Petersen’s “Outbreak” (1995), which told the fictionalized tale of how an Ebola-like virus spread across Africa and into the U.S. Moreover, one such film, Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), is not merely a nail-nibbling thriller but Kazan’s first indisputably major film, a now-classic piece of noir-style urban cinematic storytelling.

“Panic” was shot entirely on location in New Orleans. Rich in local color and full of vivid performances by a top-tier cast led by Richard Widmark, it portrays with jolting immediacy the story of how a fictional U.S. Public Health Service official (played by Widmark) must race against the clock to track down a carrier of pneumonic plague before the local papers get wind of the potential for a citywide epidemic, thereby causing terrified local citizens to run for their lives and spread the disease to other cities.

Er…sound familiar?

Part of what makes “Panic in the Streets” is the high-contrast school-of-noir cinematography of Joseph MacDonald, which looks so impeccably right precisely because the unwitting carriers of the plague bacillus are small-time gangsters who refuse to believe that the plague will kill them if they don’t turn themselves in first. Accordingly, much of “Panic” unfolds in a string of seedy tenements, juke joints and diners, and many of the “actors” were real-life New Orleanians whose unmistakable accents sound just like the film looks. “We used the city’s people as our extras and their homes, shops, and streets for scenery,” Kazan recalled in his 1988 autobiography. Long before the phrase “cinéma-vérité” entered the language, “Panic in the Streets” had the you-are-there-and-this-is-real feel of a documentary.

It’s fascinating, too, to see Widmark play a good guy. Just three years earlier, he’d made his film debut in “Kiss of Death,” in which he played Tommy Udo, a murderous psychopath who shoves a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs and giggles as she bounces. From that horrific moment onward, casting directors thought of him as the baddest of bad guys, a piece of typecasting that bore no resemblance to the real-life Widmark, a part-time gentleman farmer who hated violence and was married to the same woman from 1942 until her death in 1997. Not surprisingly, he longed to break free from the snickering-monster stereotype that made him a star, and Kazan made it possible for him to do so in “Panic in the Streets,” in which he plays a good-hearted family man whose only “vice” is his single-minded devotion to his indispensable job.

Epidemiology, needless to say, has made colossal strides in the nearly seven decades since the release of “Panic in the Streets.” But the fundamental problem facing those government officials whose duty it is to keep coronavirus under control remains unchanged: How do you stop an infectious disease from spreading all over the world now that it’s possible for anyone to jump on a plane and travel to another continent within hours? “We’re all in a community—the same one!” Widmark’s character warns the politicians who long to cover up what is happening to their town. “I could leave here today and be in Africa tomorrow—and whatever disease I had would go with me.” Rarely have those simple but telling words been as relevant as they are today.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

[N.S.: Satchmo at the Waldorf is not about the alleged journalist now calling himself Ronan Farrow.]