The Killer That Stalked New York (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Producers and Blazing Saddles came time for TCM’s weekly “Noir Alley” showing – and an unusual film “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller readily admitted he’d scheduled because the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has given it new relevance. It was The Killer That Stalked New York, made by Columbia Pictures in 1950 and a combination noir-style thriller and medical story with an emphasis on public health. It was made right after 20th Century-Fox had released Panic in the Streets, starring Richard Widmark as a public-health doctor searching the underworld of New Orleans to find a carrier of plague. In this movie (which Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn held back for six months until Panic in the Streets finished its theatrical run) the “Patient Zero” is Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes, who’s superb), a nightclub singer who married her accompanist, Matt Krane (Charles Korwin), only Matt turned out to be a no-good rotter who took her to Cuba so she could receive diamonds he planned to use her to smuggle into the U.S. While there she also contracted smallpox, and when she finally got so sick she was hospitalized she spread it around to quite a few other people, from a young boy who drank at the same water fountain she had to a young girl she met in the hospital and, thinking it was a kind gesture, gave her the pin she was wearing which she’d bought in Cuba and, of course, contained smallpox virus. In the real 1947 New York smallpox epidemic the original carrier was a rug merchant named Eugene Le Bar, who stopped in New York City after vacationing in Mexico with his wife before returning to their home in Maine, but a sleazy nightclub singer and her unscrupulous criminal accompanist/husband (who is also cruising Sheila’s sister Francie, played superbly by Lola Albright, and has been having an affair with her while Sheila has been out of the country) is obviously better “movie” than a decent carpet salesman.

Sheila is being tracked both by U.S. Treasury agents hoping to arrest her and her accomplices (whoever they may be) for the diamond smuggling, and by the New York Public Health Department, represented mainly by William Bishop as Dr. Ben Wood and the young (or at least youngish) Dorothy Malone as his nurse, who gradually realize they have the potential for a mass epidemic on their hands and need not only to warn the entire population of New York City about the dangers but also to get them vaccinated. The Killer That Stalked New York began when Columbia bought the movie rights to a Cosmopolitan magazine article on the real epidemic by Milton Lehman, though it was Harry Essex who got tabbed to write the actual script.The director was Earl MacAvoy, who’d worked as an assistant director on several films but only made three as full-fledged director: Cargo to Capetown (1950), a good but not great adventure film; this one and something called The Barefoot Mailman, and he died in 1959 at just age 45 after not having worked in films for eight years. It seems a pity his career was so short because he’s incredible, keeping the plot moving effectively and getting dramatic performances from his actors – even the child ones and the ones in very small parts. As the movie tells its story the two plot lines eventually merge and the cops finally trace Sheila Bennet after Matt kills Anthony Moss (Art Smith), the jeweler who was supposed to fence the stones for him (but refused because they were too “hot”), and the cops finally corner Sheila on the ledge of a building. The police don’t really care whether they get Sheila dead or alive, but the public health doctors want to keep her alive so they can do contact tracing.

The most fascinating part of the movie from a modern-day COVID-era point of view is the mass vaccination campaign ordered by the New York City government, headed by a mayor (Roy Roberts) who in order to set a good example for his people gets the first vaccine dose himself and invites all the media to photograph him doing so – how like Joe Biden and unlike Donald Trump! The city government is determined to vaccinate all eight million New Yorkers and to offer the vaccine free, and whenever they run into the problems that have become all too familiar to us today – lack of trained medical personnel, lack of locations to give the shots in, and midway through the campaign the exhaustion of the available vaccine supply – they run right through them and see what they can do to overcome them. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is the one in which the mayor summons the CEO’s of the leading pharmaceutical companies and essentially demands that they drop everything else during the present emergency and just produce smallpox vaccine – and his shame campaign works. There’s also a brief acknowledgment of an anti-vaccine campaign similar to the ones we’ve seen around COVID – though unlike today’s anti-vaxxers, the ones in the movie stop at legal demonstrations and don’t actually try to disrupt the vaccinations. Though the New York vaccine campaign – both as depicted in this film and the real one that occurred in 1947 – had several advantages over the one today (they were only trying to vaccinate a city, not an entire country; and the smallpox vaccine was an established product that companies knew how to produce, and it required only one vaccine dose instead of the two needed for COVID), the biggest difference between then and now was an aggressive government response that grabbed the emergency by the proverbial tail and did not allow the disease to become a political football.

If today’s health crisis is virtually an object lesson in how not to respond to a public-health emergency – especially in the contemptible response of ex-President Trump and his consistent belittling of the threat and anyone who wanted to take it seriously – the depiction of one in The Killer That Stalked New York is an example of how to deal with one. It’s amazing that to this day the Republicans in the current Congress are balking at a COVID aid package that includes help for state and local governments – why? At a time when we’re depending on state and local governments to distribute what vaccines we have and coordinate with their medical systems to get the shots in people’s arms, is this really the time to whine about alleged local government corruption and play “starve the beast”? Indeed, one of the reasons the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been worse in the U.S. than anywhere else – we have 4 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the cases – was the decades of anti-government propaganda issued by the American Right in general and the Republican Party in particular that has undermined people’s faith in government’s ability to respond to anything, even the kind of sweeping emergency that only governments have the reach and scope to respond to effectively. I don’t usually get on my political soapbox in my moviemagg blog – that’s what the zengersmag blog is for – but it’s irresistible after seeing a movie like The Killer That Stalked New York in which the public response to an epidemic gets it right to be angry and shocked at how badly we muffed COVID-19 for almost a year and how the Biden administration has its work cut out for it not only in mobilizing the response that should have been made but cleaning up the garbage left behind by the Trumpites and their nihilism.

One thing that startled me about The Killer That Stalked New York in comparison to the present-day situation is that no one in the movie, including the doctors and nurses, is wearing a mask – that public-health precaution apparently eluded the folks in this movie even though there are accounts of the medieval plagues in which the main public-health measures that were urged on people were keeping apart from each other (people then even carried sticks with which to push away anyone else who got too close) and wearing masks. Charles and I first watched The Killer That Stalked New York nine years ago and we liked it (my comments then are at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/01/killer-that-stalked-new-york-columbia.html) but didn’t see it as anything special; now it comes forth with chilling relevance as a warning as well as an example.