A Timely Movie about Tracking Down a Plague! TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York (1951), with Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop and Barry Kelley, with a Script by Harry Essex

By David in TN
Friday, February 5, 2021 at 7:26:00 P.M. EST

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is The Killer That Stalked New York (1951), with Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop and Barry Kelley, screenplay by Harry Essex, directed by Earl McEvoy.

Film Noir Guide: “The killer that’s stalking New York isn’t the mad-dog kind you might have thought. It’s actually smallpox being carried by a nightclub singer and part-time jewel thief (Keyes), who picked up the dreaded disease while in Cuba stealing diamonds for her husband (Korvin).

“Bishop is the doctor who misdiagnoses her condition and sends her on her way to infect millions of New Yorkers. When health officials become aware of the disease, Bishop is appointed head of an investigating team to find the unknown carrier. Unknown to him, T-man Kelley also is hunting for Keyes, who’s becoming progressively sicker as she wanders the city searching for her cheating husband (he’s taken off with the diamonds).

“Broadcasting the motto ‘Be safe, Be Sure, Be Vaccinated!,’ the city begins the almost impossible task of vaccinating all New Yorkers, some of whom, in cynical Big Apple fashion, are dead set against it, believing it all to be hype. But when the vaccine runs out, city officials are faced with a possible panic.

“This effective little suspense noir, with Keyes doing a fine job as a latter-day Typhoid Mary, was made the same year as the similar Panic in the Streets. When Panic hit the theaters first, Killer was held by the studio and not released until the following year.”

David in TN: Last week in his outro, Eddie called this one “timely.”

N.S.: I can’t recall any American-based (or foreign, for that matter) “plague” movie of the past, in which the authorities, instead of doing everything in their power to stop the epidemic, did everything they could to use it as a weapon with which to harm law-abiding people—I’m looking at you, Anthony Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and Joe Biden—and aid and abet cut-throats, and spread the outbreak!