That’s only one of the ways in which Panic in the Streets is unconventional among action pictures of the early ’50s. The fact that the plague is brought into port by a foreigner suggests the air of xenophobia that carries from anti-Commie pictures with humorless T-men heroes into sci-fi sagas like War of the Worlds where the hostile extraterrestrial visitors can be read as symbols for the reds. However, when one of the mayor’s aides tries to prioritize the danger to the local community, Widmark’s Dr. Clinton Reed counters that in the modern world, where a man can travel across the globe in a day, we all belong, for better or for worse, to the same community — hardly a sentiment we’d expect to hear in a 1950 movie. Also unusual, though typical of Kazan, is the sensitivity of the domestic scenes between Widmark and his wife (the gifted, underused Barbara Bel Geddes), which would be throwaways in most action films, and the overall high caliber of the acting. (This was Kazan’s first really good picture, though he’d been making them for five years and had already won an Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement.) Jack Palance plays the sociopathic killer; Zero Mostel is unexpectedly effective as one of his thugs.
By comparison, Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, from 1953, is blunt and unnuanced, but it’s also speedy and colorful. Here Widmark plays Skip McCoy, a pickpocket (“cannon” in the underworld argot Fuller’s script revels in) fresh out of jail who lifts a wallet from the handbag of a young woman (Jean Peters) on a subway. What he finds there is a strip of microfilm containing military secrets that her boyfriend (Richard Kiley) sent her to deliver to a Communist agent. The fed on her tail (Willis Bouchey) joins forces with the cop who put McCoy away and is itching to do it again (this time for life). But the plot, which Dwight Taylor devised, has some surprising twists. What everyone remembers best from the movie is Thelma Ritter’s tough-tender performance as Moe Williams, who lives by her wits and by selling information to anyone who pays for it. Almost anyone: she doesn’t like Commies. Fuller frames her performance — especially her last scene — almost too lovingly; you can see the set-up for the inevitable Academy Award nomination. But if he oversells her, you understand why: she’s awfully good. (On Oscar night, she lost out to Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity.)
The exception I alluded to is THE THIRD MAN (1949), directed by Carol Reed in 1949 from an original script by Graham Greene — not because it isn’t a Cold War picture but because it isn’t merely a popular entertainment (though it masquerades as one). It’s a masterpiece, and surely the best of the dozens of movies with stories by Greene. Set in Vienna in the days following the Second World War, it sketches, economically and convincingly, the way in which the Allied powers divided up the ruins of the Nazi empire: Vienna is blocked out into Russian, French, British, and American sectors, and those who have made it through the war have become scroungers, living any way they can — like the actress, Anna (the haunting beauty Alida Valli), who supplements her meager income with gifts of hard-to-get commodities thrown at her feet by admirers, and her landlady, whose outraged sensibilities are assuaged by a pack of cigarettes. The movie is about the kind of scoundrel who thrives in an environment where so many are desperate for basic items — survival items. He’s Harry Lime (an unforgettably witty performance by Orson Welles), who peddles diluted penicillin to local hospitals.
