|
"The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence," says Camus. Sketches for A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront are at once visible, a game of poker above a blues dive segues into a view of a humid New Orleans night (a choice image: Jack Palance's taut profile against a bare light bulb), complete with a freight train barely missing the febrile clod stumbling across the tracks. A murdered Patient Zero, a bubonic epidemic two days in the making. "A touch of swamp fever or something," noticed amid the joshing of morgue attendants, investigated by science (Richard Widmark's Public Health Service officer) and law (Paul Douglas' police captain). Their tenuous alliance is mirrored in the riotous pairing of grimacing hoodlum (Palance) and henpecked sidekick (Zero Mostel), searching the city for contraband that turns out to be Old World disease. At the crossroads of film noir and neorealism, Elia Kazan finds his sweet spot: Sweaty faces, scummy locations, the visceral poetic. A Potemkin nod in the brawl on the quarantined cargo ship, a chase from tenement down to the wharf and up the ropes for the portrait of scurrying menace. The veiled call against foreign infiltrators is dented by Kazan's fondness for the high-energy chafing among contrasting ethnic groups, occupations, accents, body shapes and sizes. "Keep asking questions, Doc, and you finally get answers." The most startling moment occurs in the domestic eye of the storm—during a chat with the wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) about food, bills, and an impending pregnancy, the exhausted officer who's been inoculating palookas all day suddenly flinches from the woman's touch. Wise in The Andromeda Strain prefers a laboratory approach, Soderbergh has his own form to experiment with in Contagion. With Dan Riss, Tommy Cook, Tommy Rettig, Guy Thomajan, Alexis Minotis, and Emile Meyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |