Good start, but then it gets ruined

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Apart from the fact that the story unfolds mostly by night time there is no reason to categorize this movie as 'noir'. There's no femme fatale involved, no inescapable route to destruction. Also, there may be cause for alarm but there's no panic in the streets whatsoever.

In New Orleans, Blackie (Jack Palance) and his thugs attack and kill a sick man who walked out of his game after winning his money. The coroner finds something suspicious and calls in Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark). He declares it the extremely contagious pneumonic plague. He faces opposition as he tries to raise the alarm.This is a rough and meandering thriller. The most compelling thing about the movie is the title. It's a lot of cop and robber procedural. Jack Palance is a good ruffian when he's on the screen. I like the dark gritty opening. Richard Widmark is a solid tough guy. None of the other actors are quite as striking. I don't find the investigation that compelling. It would be better if lots of people start dropping dead. The real world locations are great but the movie isn't terribly thrilling.

Very few films have this kind of "flow", this kind of clever logistics. It is as though no strain went into the formation of the movie, but instead was the result of complete inspiration.The plot is that of a doctor and detective bonding together to stop a plague that is hidden in the underworld.The pace is unbelievably perfect. We are drawn in, hook, line, and sinker, into the story. Some movies struggle to do what this does. This movie not only tells a story, but takes you on a journey.One watches this and is mesmerized by the flow that is so natural. One wonders if it is incredibly clever writing or incredibly clever directing. Obviously, both are involved.

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