CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

JohnHowardReid Director Elia Kazan really enjoyed directing the superb thriller, Panic in the Streets (1950) - "It's the first film I regard as really mine. Richard Murphy and I worked on the script every morning and re-wrote every scene to take advantage of the terrific color and photographic richness of New Orleans".But as with "Boomerang", Kazan told me that he was still unhappy with the camerawork: "Visually, it could have been much stronger." However, unlike his comments on many of the players in "Boomerang", Kazan had nothing but praise for his cast in Panic in the Streets: "Dick Widmark was a good friend of mine. I had directed him on the stage. He was typecast as vicious killers at this stage of his movie career, but I changed all that. He played a nice person in Panic, and he was like that in real life. "Then I cast Barbara Bel Geddes. Jack Palance I knew when he was Brando's understudy for A Streetcar Named Desire. This was his first film. I also cast Zero Mostel who had made only one movie before - way back in 1943."

Martha Wilcox Having seen Barbara Bel Geddes and Paul Douglas in 'Fourteen Hours', I was keen to learn more about Barbara's track record prior to 1951 by watching this film. Don't bother watching this poorly made offering which doesn't even come close to the quality of 'Fourteen Hours'. Although Barbara gives a good performance, good acting does not necessarily make a good film. Richard Widmark is not engaging, even though he is a good actor. Paul Douglas was far superior in 'Fourteen Hours' than this film. Jack Palance is despicable and painful to look at. For Richard Widmark fans I say stay away from this film and watch 'Full House' instead. For Barbara Bel Geddes fans I say stay away from this film and watch 'Fourteen Hours'.

Rodrigo Amaro Lt. Cmdr. Clinton (Richard Widmark) is a military doctor who has the ungrateful duty of tracking down the killers of a mysterious foreign man who carried a deadly plague and now this disease might be spreading around the city, and Clinton must find everybody who had contact with the deceased in less than 48 hours before the news and the disease cause panic in the streets. Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" is a good and original story at the time of its release about the difficulties of medical, political and law enforcement institutions in their mission of controlling things before they get out of control. In the story, Widmark's character not only has to find these guys, but he has to deal with bureaucracy among politics, journalists who sees in this case a great story to be published and that might alarm the people in a bad way, and the only help he's gonna get is with some people in the crowd who might have known the mysterious man, and help of a chief of police (Paul Douglas) who's not much cooperative at first so it's gonna take time to solve things but they don't have enough time to fulfill their task.The treatment given to the story wasn't too much interesting with its division of characters and situations. The chase for the "infecteds" was the most thrilling and interesting part of the plot; while the others involving Clinton's family and the bad guys played by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, almost dragged the film into a boring and tiresome experience. Looking at the film in its surface it's very plausible but with some arguable problems. These guys are out there, they had contact the infected man, they walk to several places, talk to other people and they're spreading the plague, so how come only they had the disease and almost no one else does it too? I mean, the script was too much light and positive (yeah, I know it's the 1950's so they couldn't be so depressive showing that a disease could devastate a whole city), it wasn't realistic enough in this matter and it should be. People complain about the energetic "Outbreak" (1995) but that was a more effective film than this one, it had action, suspense, and also a run against the clock in order to stop a disease that was killing thousands of people. The climatic ending was great, with a long chase in the docks; and some dialog exchange between Douglas and Widmark was brilliant, funny and thoughtful. For what it tends to do it is a very good film and nothing more than that. But we know that Kazan has better works than this. 7/10

sol ***SPOILERS*** Spine tingling big city horror drama with the local police and US Government Health Srevice trying to prevent the spread of a deadly virus, Pneumonic Plague, from engulfing the entire city of New Orleans.It's when Armenian seaman Kochak's,Lewis Charles, body was examined at the city morgue that it was found, besides having two bullets in it, to be infected with the deadly Pneumonic Plague virus! It's now the job of the police and Lt. Cmdr. Clint Reed, Richard Widmark, of the US Public Health Service to find who Kochak came in contact with and have them immediately inoculated before the disease spreads into the general population!Reed with the help of New Orleans police Captain Tom Warren, Paul Douglas, gets very little help from the public in that in order not to cause a panic he can't reveal the real reason for tracking down anyone who came in contact with the now dead Kochak. This causes a number of persons who had anything to do with him come down and die from the contagious and deadly disease that Kochak gave them!It's in fact the person who murdered Kochak Blackie, Jack Plance, and his two henchmen Fitch & Poldi, Zero Mostel & Tommy Cook, who get the wrong impression in what all this hoopla about Kochak is really all about! They think that he was sneaking in a load of illegal drugs, not Penumonic Pleague, into the city and want to get their greedy hands on it!****SPOILERS**** Exciting final with Blackie on the run from the police making his way to the city docks with Reed and Capt. Warren hot on his tail. Trying to escape on a fruit boat headed towards South America the dirty and murderous rat, Blackie, is prevented from getting on board by the ship's rat shield causing him to end up in New Orleanes Bay where he's eventually captured by the police. Blackie should consider himself lucky at that in that he can now be treated for the deadly disease he unknowingly caught off his murder victim Kochak!P.S The dangerous rope climbing scene at the end of the movie was done not by a stuntman but by actor Jack Palance himself! It was in fact Palance who was the only person on the set who was capable of doing it!