Max "Bunny" Sparber

RICHARD WIDMARK, the gaunt and sunken-eyed movie actor who died yesterday at the age of 93, started his career haunting the shadows of crime films. His first screen role, as the giggling hoodlum Tommy Udo in 1947's Kiss of Death, was a nasty piece of work, and the film provided Widmark with one of the most notorious scenes in film history: He menaces an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and, when he discovers she has been lying to him, flings her down a flight of stairs. His performance as Udo made such an impression that he was nominated for an Academy Award and immediately signed to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

Widmark was too versatile an actor, and too likable a man, to be typecast as a psychopath, but he had a knack for playing bad men and petty criminals. In his first decade acting in Hollywood he turned in dazzling performances as a hustler on the wrestling circuit in Night and the City, a pickpocket in Pickup on South Street, and a virulent racist in No Way Out. His performances in each of these films were superlative -- he could inhabit morally corrupt or ambiguous characters with an unexpected and decidedly offbeat sort of glamor. He was a great 1950s antihero: with his high shoulders and his lean frame, he almost looked like a Saul Bass illustration, and his dialogue was often peppered with hepcat slang. (He sneers the following line at a cop in Pickup on South Street: "Pack up the pitch with the charge or drive me back to my shack.") In the mid-20th century understanding of the word, Widmark was cool.

In 1950, Richard Widmark starred in a film that was something of an oddity in his early career. The film was called Panic in the Streets, and it concerns the efforts of a U.S. Public Health Service doctor and a skeptical New Orleans policeman to chase down a vicious hoodlum who murdered an illegal immigrant, but contracted pneumonic plague from the dead man. If the murderer is not caught and inoculated within a few days, he will touch off a plague -- but the men who are chasing him must do so under a cloak of extreme secrecy, or risk panicking the public.

It's a great premise for a film, and won an Oscar for its screenplay, but the film's director, Elia Kazan, made an unexpected casting choice. He cast Widmark as the Public Health Service doctor, rather than the sadistic murderer. As the killer, Kazan brought in a hulking former boxer whose face had been badly damaged during World War II, when he had bailed out of a burning B-24 Liberator. That actor, making his screen debut, was Jack Palance.

The film is a thrilling cat and mouse game. Widmark plays his character as earnest but boyish and inexperienced, and he is paired with Paul Douglas, a heavyset and irritable character actor, here playing a New Orleans cop who at first can hardly be bothered to extend any help at all to Widmark. The two seem badly overmatched in their attempts to locate Palance's character, Blackie, who has thrived for years in New Orleans' run-down, impoverished, immigrant, and frequently criminal demimonde. Blackie is utterly ruthless -- in one scene, in order to prevent the police from following him up a rickety flight of stairs in the back of a tenement, Blackie flings one of his own men over the side of the stairway and to his death, a move that eerily recalls Widmark's notorious debut performance.

The film is shot with noir's use of of deep shadows and odd angles, and some of the performances recall the acting in German expressionism, the style of filmmaking that most directly inspired noir. When Blackie kills the illegal immigrants, as an example, his men pursue the sick and terrified man through the dark streets of the Irish Channel, and the pursuers adopt hunched, almost wolflike poses. Later, as Blackie, himself now displaying the symptoms of plague, desperately attempts to evade the police by scurrying underneath a Mississippi River dock, and then drags himself up a long rope leading to a ship, he is filmed so that he seems rodentlike.

But Kazan also decided to experiment with a documentary sensibility in making Panic in the Streets, and so the entire film makes use of real New Orleans locations, and often uses nonactors in smaller roles. These touches lend the film an authenticity that noir of the period, which was generally shot on soundstages, lacked. In one scene, Widmark attempts to locate Blackie by going to the workplace and saloons of dockworkers, and the locations and the dockworkers are real. They are a weary and tough-looking group, and they initially give Widmark's inquiries a quiet brush off. But when Widmark starts flashing money and offering to pay off informants, a dockworker takes him aside and explains to him that he has just put his own life in jeopardy, and, man, you believe it.

Panic in the Streets never really caught on as a critical darling, probably because it is, primarily, a well-made potboiler with some interesting directorial flourishes. Kazan would make good use of the lesson he learned in this film in two later, and better regarded, movies, returning to New Orleans in 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire and revisiting the world of dockworkers in 1954's On the Waterfront. But the film is more than just a steppingstone to Kazan's most famous films. Panic in the Streets is full of exquisitely detailed human moments, some of which are filmed with a off-kilter rhythm that makes them feel improvised. Widmark and Paul Douglas's relationship is keenly observed, as both men develop a grudging respect and affection for each other; this parallels nicely with Blackie's relationship with his sidekick, played with typically neurotic mannerisms by Zero Mostel, but without any of his usually comic bluster. As the film progresses, Widmark and Douglas become a good team, effectively closing a net around Blackie, who grows sicker and whose relationship with Mostel erodes. Suddenly, Widmark's job of finding Palance starts seeming possible after all, and this classic storyline, in which the hero must complete an impossible task, is nearly perfectly handled.

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