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THE THIRD MAN: A popular entertainment and much more. |
With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty “Cold War Cinema” series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways. INVASION U.S.A. (1959), RED MENACE (1949), and PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) are anti-Communist action pictures. The stupefyingly clunky ROCKETSHIP X-M (1950) is a sci-fi cautionary fable for the atomic age: the first rocket crew bound for the moon falls off course and lands on Mars, where a nuclear holocaust has wiped out an advanced civilization and the planet’s only inhabitants are cavemen. The protagonist of CITY OF FEAR (1959) is a thief who steals an atomic capsule and has to be tracked down before he can contaminate LA; the hero of D.O.A. (1950) has swallowed poison that will off him in 48 hours — giving him just long enough to solve his own murder. PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950) has a classic film noir opening: when a Greek immigrant newly arrived in New Orleans walks away from a poker game with his pockets full, the hood whose money he won and two stooges follow him through the shadowy streets, across the tracks, and onto the pier, where they shoot him down. But the coroner who examines the body finds it riddled with pneumonic plague, and the health authorities and the cops have to find his killers before an epidemic erupts.Neither the low-rent, engaging D.O.A. nor the gripping Panic in the Streets (superbly staged and shot by Elia Kazan, the year before he turned out A Streetcar Named Desire) is tightly focused on Cold War subjects, and neither can be said to offer a metaphor for Communism or nuclear devastation. But both belong to the Cold War era. The toxin ravaging the body of the hero of D.O.A., Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien), is luminous, a bizarre, exotic detail that links it to a movie like City of Fear. Bigelow can’t harm anyone else, so the ticking-clock element of the picture — unlike that of Panic in the Streets — has to do with justice, not danger. And Panic in the Streets conveys the terror of imminent disaster that is one of the distinguishing features of many thrillers of the period (including sci-fi thrillers like Rocketship X-M), though Kazan and the writers, Richard Murphy and Daniel Fuchs, contain that fear within a small band of investigators — mostly the public-health-service doctor (Richard Widmark, successfully cast against type) and the hard-boiled police captain (Paul Douglas) — rather than moving to the phase where the public finds out what’s going on and mass hysteria ensues.
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.)
