Washburn). Insistent narration (“The city’s finest engraved the image of the Blonde Death in their brains”) from familiar voice Reed Hadley, on-the-streets lo- cation work and tribute to the dedicated, clipped professionals (“No one told smallpox it’s Sun- day!”) who track Sheila and the epidemic locate the film in the cycle of actuality thrillers inau- gurated by THE NAKED CITY (1948), but there’s a nightmar- ish dread of disease (“One in- fected person can sneak through and threaten the lives of mil- lions!”) which might have a po- litical or psychological edge. Johnson and Wood—the names suggest the potency of these weary, get-the-job-done pros— both let Sheila slip early on and redouble their efforts to contain the foreign corruption she has unwittingly imported. Only the narrator and the audience know their cases are entwined and they criss-cross until the connections are made late in the day. Sheila is a fascinating anti- heroine, hung up on an homme fatal, cleft-chinned creep Matt Krane (Charles Korvin). He has packed her off to dangerous for- eign parts to take all the legal (and health) risks while running around Stateside with her younger, dimmer sister Francie (Lola Al- bright) and planning to dump them both as soon as the pack- age (which Sheila has posted) ar- rives. Smallpox incident markers spread across the map, trigger- ing a fantasy glimpse of depopu- lated New York which prefigures deserted city science fiction like THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL. Meanwhile, Sheila takes on a pasty-faced, semi- monstrous look (the film is reti- cent about showing actual pox) and, alert to Matt’s perfidy— which includes driving Francie to suicide—totters through the city on a quest for revenge which
gives her superhuman strength. Like much documentary noir, THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK envisions two par- allel worlds: a well-lit, well-or- ganized bureaucracy where dedicated, yet ordinary officials tirelessly strive to wipe out crime and disease (Cuba, not yet asso- ciated with communism, was still in dangerous, un-American wa- ters) and a seamy urban sub- strata populated by desperate, doomed lowlife characters (even the honest poor, like a cheery milk-man, become lethal disease vectors). Korvin, so caricature- handsome he’s splendidly ugly, plays one of the nastiest creeps in the genre, abusing his women so badly Sheila keeps coming after him even as she rots with disease. Keyes, forever known as “Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister” and one of John Huston’s wives, gets probably her best screen role—she’s no knock-out, but initially has a battered glamour which frays as she becomes luminously unwell. McEvoy stages a KING
KONG-style climax of rooftop pursuit and fatal plunges, before a tribute to the men and women who combat germs and catch smugglers does its best to dispel the general air of scare-monger- ing. This is a tribute to prepared- ness rather than a vision of doom, and later public health issues—not to mention the proliferation of epidemic TV movies—make it almost cozy. The Mayor of New York (Roy Roberts) insists on a damn-the- cost program of mass vaccina- tion for the whole population and, when stocks of vaccine run short, calls in the heads of pharmaceu- ticals companies to give a lecture and cut red tape in order to make sure that everyone (rich and poor, worthy and unworthy) gets “the scratch.” We don’t see the wealthy or unscrupulous getting
ahead in the queue or profiteer- ing from the panic and the city’s health care budget seems bot- tomless. Dorothy Malone, yet to blossom as a “bad girl” for Dou- glas Sirk, is wasted as a nice nurse, but there are vivid cam- eos from Whit Bissell (as Sheila’s flophouse proprietor brother), Jim Backus (as a club-owner who gets the bug by pawing the talent and passes it on glad-handing), Rich- ard Egan (as a square-jawed treasury man) and cadaverous Peter Brocco as “Tom the Wino.” Black-and-white (of course) pho- tography by Joseph Biroc (THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHAR- LOTTE, I SAW WHAT YOU DID) and music by Universal monster man Hans J. Salter add to the nightmare feel. PANIC IN THE STREETS seems invested with layers of meaning by its makers, who equate disease with com- munism and counter-measures with McCarthyite righteous deter- mination; THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK is similarly open to complex readings, but less deliberate about it—in many ways, the smaller, punchier film plays better today.
Directed by Columbia stal- wart Henry Levin (CRY OF THE WEREWOLF, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH) from a script by James Edward Grant (MIRACLES FOR SALE), James Gunn (LADY OF BURLESQUE) and Lawrence Kimble (ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY), TWO OF A KIND is the old impersonate-the- missing-heir gambit. Brandy Kirby (Lizabeth Scott), a femme fatale who comes on oddly like a social worker, investigates the background of bingo-hall minion Michael “Lefty” Farrell (Edmond O’Brien) because her lawyer boss Vincent Mailer (Alexander Knox) needs a Chicago-raised orphan to substitute for the long-lost son of tycoon William McIntyre (Griff
47
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
