Notes on films

PANIC IN THE STREETS (Kazan, 1950) - I really loved this mix between a noir and a contagious disease movie. A man gets shot after a poker game (in the amazing one-shot sequence above), and it turns out he has … the plague! And then the person who dumped the movie really has to be found, since he can turn the outbreak into an epidemic. It’s tense, it’s well-constructed, it has Richard Widmark in a good-guy role, it uses the big planes of Jack Palance’s face in very interesting ways, and it ends with an extended chase sequence on the waterfront that’s almost as good as the chase in the beginning.