Filmed entirely on location in New Orleans,
Panic in the Streets stars
Richard Widmark
as Dr. Clinton Reed, a physician from the U.S. Health Service who must
race against time to stop a plague. The carrier was an illegal alien,
murdered by criminals
Jack Palance and
Zero Mostel.
When local officials note the strange condition of the corpse, they
fear that the germs will spread to epidemic proportions, and thus summon
Reed to wrest control of the situation. At first facing opposition from
rule-bound police captain
Paul Douglas,
Widmark is finally able to work hand-in-glove with
Douglas in tracking down
Palance and
Mostel, who have themselves become plague carriers. Many of the actors in
Panic in the Streets are local nonprofessionals, selected by director
Elia Kazan because of their "rightness" within the framework of the story; the rest of the cast is peopled by such film veterans as
Barbara Bel Geddes,
Tommy Cook,
Emile Meyer and
H.T. TSIANG.
Widmark's son is played by an uncredited
Tommy Rettig, four years before he starred on the
Lassie TV series. Though
Elia Kazan liked to claim that much of
Panic in the Streets was improvised, there
was a script, adapted by
Richard Murphy and
Daniel Fuchs from a story by
Edward Anhalt and
Edna Anhalt.
