Jack Palance Makes Everything Alright

Elia Kazan is known for two things: making movies and ratting folks out to HUAC. We’re only gonna talk about the first thing here.

The 1950 film Panic in the Streets was Kazan’s first of many successes during the decade and also in some ways presaged On the Water Front which would be released a scant four years later. A character in Panic at one point even utters the phrase, “We’ve already combed the water front.” But both films involve the docks in various ways and here Kazan seemed to work out the scenery and different ways to play with the physical nature of that space.

Noir is generally dependent upon setting – which is why the docks work out as a location. But the Richard Widmark character, Dr. Clinton Reed, lives in the suburbs surrounded by family and all too friendly neighbors. Needless to say, there are portions of this flick that don’t fit seamlessly into the strictest definition of the genre. Yet, considering the frequency by which we see Widmark in noir related films, his presence does lend an air of suspense to the proceedings. And perhaps that’s a better way to categorize this flick, despite the DVD case clearly proclaiming “FOX FILM NOIR.”

Compounding that issue of setting in Panic is the fact that Widmark isn’t a cop, detective or criminal – he’s a federal employee working on public health. Here too Kazan’s stable of writers decide to differentiate their film from the general perception of what a noir film should be.

However, the presence of Jack Palance (as the villain of course) easily nullifies any deviation from the accepted mores of filmic definition. His scowl, being dressed in a black shirt constantly, towering over Zero Mostel – everything the man does in this film is intimidating in one way or another (as an aside though, there is a scene where Palance is eating with friends and manages to drop food all over the table – and no I don’t know why that shot was kept in).

With these basic characters in place, the police seek two men who murdered an anonymous immigrant that was carrying the plague. The cops need to find the perpetrators on two counts: the murder of this immigrant man and because Palance and his cohort may be carrying the disease. There’s a general sense of doom surrounding the pursuit of these men – there are time constraints after all.

Perhaps using time as a catalyst to work non-stop, the Widmark character goes two days without seeing his family, working at a hectic pace. After countless hours of canvassing any bar or restaurant that these men could have gone, and exhausting every interview prospect, the conclusion of the film comes down to a coincidence that occurs everyday in real life – sometimes you just run into somebody. That of course doesn’t inoculate the entire population of a major metropolitan city or actually put the criminals in custody.

You’ll just need to watch Jack Palance climb a rope as if he were in middle school gym class to find out what happens in the end.