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| A beautifully lit Jack Palance (in his debut movie). |
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Richard Murphy, Daniel Fuchs, Edward and Edna Anhalt (story)
What if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it? We’re in control of so much in the world, we can take its resources from anywhere (and cause untold damage in the process), we can explore the deepest seas and the highest mountains, we can study how life can flourish in wildernesses of ice, jungle and burning desert and use that knowledge for our own ends. We can transport ourselves rapidly from any point on the planet to any other. We can ramble pointlessly on a blog and publish it instantly for the entire world to read. Or ignore.
But what if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it? Deep down, we can’t shake the awareness of our own fragility, the tenuous hold we really have on the world. We’re not really in control, we’re just fiddling around with the details, and the world is never slow to show us just how tiny we are: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis. And the more we learn, the more we find out just what nature might have install for us – life on earth has been dealt a devastating blow with considerable regularity over the years, with mass extinction events being triggered variously by objects dropping from the sky and chemicals and heat bursting up from under our feet. On top of that, there’s the inevitability of the sun eventually packing it in, and the likelihood of the magnetic field flipping and failing to protect us for long enough that we all die, not to mention the alarming possibility that the universe may exist in a false vacuum (which could be replaced at any time by a lower energy or total vacuum, casually annihilating all matter in the process). Should the universe get a bit tired of us, there’s really not a lot we can do about it.
Over the years, cinema has never been slow to pick away at this particular wound on our consciousness. Where once catastrophes beyond man’s control could be nothing other than the wrath of a vengeful god, the silver screen took one of its favourite plot devices – chance – and expanded it out to threaten great swathes of humanity on the whim of outrageous fortune. Even in the earliest days of film, we find Fire!, James Williamson’s dramatic and innovative tale of, well, a fire; a little over a decade later, when the collision between the Titanic and a ruddy great iceberg brought news of genuine disaster to the world’s radios and newspapers, the movies weren’t at all far behind with their own tales of the collision (Mime Misu’s Nacht und Eis and August Blom’s Atlantis were both released within months of the accident).
Skip forward a century – hopping dextrously over the giants of disaster, over-the-top we’re-all-going-to-die flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno – and the last couple of months before writing have given us a couple more. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia follows the ever popular (and comparatively new) sub-genre of mass extinction as a consequence of large objects flying through space, whilst Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion threatens us all with the possibility of a devastating pandemic, following the likes of Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, Wolfgang Peterson’s Outbreak and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.
The last of which takes a somewhat unusual approach – rather than addressing the pandemic itself, which evidently can’t be cured, Bruce Willis gets sent back in time to stop those responsible for spreading it in the first place: no carrier, no outbreak. And it’s this approach (albeit without the time travel) that Elia Kazan introduced in Panic in the Streets, a taut , bleak thriller following noir-staple Richard Widmark’s desperate hunt for the carrier of plague before he can transmit it through New Orleans and onwards through the whole of the United States. Of course, this being 1950, it really is just about protecting the United States, not the rest of the world (which was presumably too full of Communists and other Enemies of America to really care about).
But I really shouldn’t quibble about the American-centric view of the end of the world (not least because it crops up in so many pictures). Panic in the Streets is far, far too good for that, an exemplary piece of classic noir from one of the finest directors of the time. And a superbly crafted drama it is, rich on tension and human emotion, closely tied to Widmark’s desperation as the doctor trying to find the shreds of information in a community used to keeping its mouth shut – while Kazan never takes the camera away from that community, from those around the doctor and the difficult world they inhabit, never fails to show the tide against which he’s swimming in all its murky depth.
There’s a striking scene right at the beginning of the picture that illustrates the skill with which Kazan handles the world of his picture. In a mortuary, an autopsy is in progress; two men who work there are arranging to meet for lunch; and a couple are asked to identify another corpse. The three events are entirely unrelated, but they take place in the same location – and, most importantly, at the same time. This isn’t a film which allows the story to go about its business unmolested and in a straight line, but one which embeds its tale of pursuit and impending doom in a world of activity and competing interests. It’s a difficult job: after all, if we are all going to die, society isn’t going to face it hand in hand and all singing from the same hymn sheet. The human world is chaos, and we’re not really in control of all that much.
But what if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it? Deep down, we can’t shake the awareness of our own fragility, the tenuous hold we really have on the world. We’re not really in control, we’re just fiddling around with the details, and the world is never slow to show us just how tiny we are: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis. And the more we learn, the more we find out just what nature might have install for us – life on earth has been dealt a devastating blow with considerable regularity over the years, with mass extinction events being triggered variously by objects dropping from the sky and chemicals and heat bursting up from under our feet. On top of that, there’s the inevitability of the sun eventually packing it in, and the likelihood of the magnetic field flipping and failing to protect us for long enough that we all die, not to mention the alarming possibility that the universe may exist in a false vacuum (which could be replaced at any time by a lower energy or total vacuum, casually annihilating all matter in the process). Should the universe get a bit tired of us, there’s really not a lot we can do about it.
Over the years, cinema has never been slow to pick away at this particular wound on our consciousness. Where once catastrophes beyond man’s control could be nothing other than the wrath of a vengeful god, the silver screen took one of its favourite plot devices – chance – and expanded it out to threaten great swathes of humanity on the whim of outrageous fortune. Even in the earliest days of film, we find Fire!, James Williamson’s dramatic and innovative tale of, well, a fire; a little over a decade later, when the collision between the Titanic and a ruddy great iceberg brought news of genuine disaster to the world’s radios and newspapers, the movies weren’t at all far behind with their own tales of the collision (Mime Misu’s Nacht und Eis and August Blom’s Atlantis were both released within months of the accident).
Skip forward a century – hopping dextrously over the giants of disaster, over-the-top we’re-all-going-to-die flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno – and the last couple of months before writing have given us a couple more. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia follows the ever popular (and comparatively new) sub-genre of mass extinction as a consequence of large objects flying through space, whilst Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion threatens us all with the possibility of a devastating pandemic, following the likes of Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, Wolfgang Peterson’s Outbreak and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.
The last of which takes a somewhat unusual approach – rather than addressing the pandemic itself, which evidently can’t be cured, Bruce Willis gets sent back in time to stop those responsible for spreading it in the first place: no carrier, no outbreak. And it’s this approach (albeit without the time travel) that Elia Kazan introduced in Panic in the Streets, a taut , bleak thriller following noir-staple Richard Widmark’s desperate hunt for the carrier of plague before he can transmit it through New Orleans and onwards through the whole of the United States. Of course, this being 1950, it really is just about protecting the United States, not the rest of the world (which was presumably too full of Communists and other Enemies of America to really care about).
But I really shouldn’t quibble about the American-centric view of the end of the world (not least because it crops up in so many pictures). Panic in the Streets is far, far too good for that, an exemplary piece of classic noir from one of the finest directors of the time. And a superbly crafted drama it is, rich on tension and human emotion, closely tied to Widmark’s desperation as the doctor trying to find the shreds of information in a community used to keeping its mouth shut – while Kazan never takes the camera away from that community, from those around the doctor and the difficult world they inhabit, never fails to show the tide against which he’s swimming in all its murky depth.
There’s a striking scene right at the beginning of the picture that illustrates the skill with which Kazan handles the world of his picture. In a mortuary, an autopsy is in progress; two men who work there are arranging to meet for lunch; and a couple are asked to identify another corpse. The three events are entirely unrelated, but they take place in the same location – and, most importantly, at the same time. This isn’t a film which allows the story to go about its business unmolested and in a straight line, but one which embeds its tale of pursuit and impending doom in a world of activity and competing interests. It’s a difficult job: after all, if we are all going to die, society isn’t going to face it hand in hand and all singing from the same hymn sheet. The human world is chaos, and we’re not really in control of all that much.
Kazan holds a mirror up to this chaos with extraordinary panache, shaping a thriller of terrific energy and suspense. I don’t want to go into the personal controversies that surrounded him; I just feel it’s important to recognise one of cinema’s greatest talents. He was a magnificent director, and Panic in the Streets deserves to be considered alongside his best, and more famous work.
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