Lessons on handling epidemics from 1950’s ‘Panic in the Streets’
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The Ebola news has made me think about Elia Kazan’s crackling and moody Panic in the Streets,a 1950 thriller about a deadly bacterium that has entered New Orleans and threatens to spread. On a recent re-viewing, it definitely left me quavering — and gave me a nightmare chill I hadn’t experienced on previous occasions.
Practically the first word we hear is bubonic plague, with visions of skeletons. The bacteria turn out to be pneumonic plague, the pulmonary variant of bubonic plague, discovered in a bullet-ridden male corpse at the docks. Richard Widmark plays the dashing and troubled hero, Lt. Commander Clinton “Clint” Reed. A doctor in the U.S. Public Health Service, Reed is fighting to convince the city brass that any man who touched the victim must be found in 24 hours — or the plague would spread.
The parallels to the Ebola outbreak are creepy: the feeling of helplessness before an unprecedented natural scourge; the concern about finding and quarantining victims; city officials arguing over how to contain it.
The differences between the current situation and the film are enormous, too — no cell phones, no GPS, no omnipresent surveillance cameras and a muzzling of the press (!) embodied by a lone journalist — but not enormous enough to reassure.
The movie begins with a group of lowlife criminals, headed by Jack Palance, playing poker with the sick man — a stowaway into the port whom Palance thinks is cheating them. The man takes his big winnings and staggers out of the room, sweating and stumbling. But his death by fever is preempted when he is gunned down by Palance and his henchmen (Zero Mostel and Guy Thomajan).
At the morgue, the alert coroner — considerably faster on the trigger than the doctors in Dallas — immediately detects the bacteria. Widmark goes into action, conferences are held and the fear begins.
Every time characters touched each other in the movie, I flinched — and there was constant touching in the film. Did Kazan deliberately amp up the physical contact — the back pattings, the in-your-face threats and faux-sympathetic brow-wipings of a menacing Palance (his first film) — to raise the terror level? Or was that just Group Theatre camaraderie?
Kazan, who would go on to direct A Streetcar Named Desire (stage and screen versions), was known for high-intensity performances and emotional naturalism. He discovered Marlon Brandoand James Dean and Warren Beatty.
Widmark, with his slow-burn stubbornness, is a moving figure. Reed is the white knight of a doctor at a time when we believed medicine could cure everything. He has his anxieties, but they are more about low pay and status than professional insecurity. He knows without a quiver of uncertainty the path that must be taken.
Reed’s relationship with police Captain Tom Warren, played by Paul Douglas (also a benign figure, though now we would immediately suspect him), is at the center of the film. They bicker, argue, score one-liners, dismiss and then come to deeply admire one another — the ideal bromance.
The movie’s sense of foreboding is not global, however. The United States is still vast enough, and a world shrunk by air travel is still in the future. When Widmark cries out that it’s now possible to get to any city in 10 hours, he’s thinking primarily about American cities.
His concern, not shared by the local aldermen, dramatizes a familiar movie trope — the social divide between those who represent greed or self-interest versus truth-sayers. This elemental conflict never loses its currency (see Jaws), probably because we often find criminal indifference or self-interest lie at the bottom of many real calamities, including oil spills, dangerously flawed cars and slipshod construction oversight.
The victim, thought to be Armenian or Czech, turns out to be a stowaway who contracted the disease through shish kebob at a Greek restaurant. (Oops, stay away from those for a while). We see how different the situation is today by the characters’ neutrality when considering this point. The words “illegal” and “immigrant,” now a flashpoint for fulminations from both political parties, are never paired. The man is designated a foreigner, with no slur intended.
By contrast, in our current adversarial atmosphere, conservatives have eagerly used the Ebola crisis to raise the specter that Latino immigrants will bring the virus over the U.S. borders.
Unusual for its time, the movie was shot on location in New Orleans, and uses non-acting locals in the cast. It gets its noir credentials — and frisson — from the atmospheric nocturnal cinematography of Joe MacDonald, occasionally relieved by the sunny-through-it-all face of Barbara Bel Geddes as Widmark’s supportive wife. While others are sending their children out of state, she’s blithely unconcerned about her son — confident that her hubby can vanquish the enemy. The troubles that beset them — Widmark’s self-pity, his sense of not being quite man enough — would probably take on a more ominous shading today, hinting at acrimonious future fights, and probably divorce.
Possibly the biggest difference between that era and now is the treatment and perception of the media. The public’s right to know be damned! Kazan’s newspaperman is thrown into jail by Douglas for safekeeping before he can spread the alarm about the plague. Now, however, it’s the media who lead the panic in the streets and living rooms. You can see it 24/7 in their eyes: The unseemly relish with which they report each new crisis and, when the story flags, replay footage with minute variations, finding new twists.
Nor would most of us want it any other way. We are afraid of Ebola — but at the same time, excited, even stimulated by it. We don’t really believe it can happen to us, and it conveniently distracts us from the real problems of ageing and mortality.
PHOTO (TOP): Trailer for 1950 Elia Kazan film, Panic in the Streets. YouTube
PHOTO (INSERT 1): Theatrical release poster for Panic in the Streets. WIKIPEDIA/Commons
PHOTO Screen-capture from Panic in the Streets. City officials meet to discuss how to assure public safety. Richard Widmark plays Dr. Clinton Reed (in uniform on left side of table.).
PHOTO (INSERT): Screen capture of film Panic in the Streets, featuring Zero Mostel (L), Jack Palance (C).
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/15/lessons-on-handling-epidemics-from-1950s-panic-in-the-streets/#comment-95144
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