The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

December 1950 release date

Directed by Earl McEvoy

Screenplay by Harry Essex

Based on a 1948 Cosmopolitan article “Smallpox, the Killer That Stalks New York,” by Milton Lehman

Music by Hans J. Salter

Edited by Jerome Thoms

Cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc

Evelyn Keyes as Sheila Bennet

Barry Kelley as Treasury Agent Johnson

Charles Korvin as Matt Krane

William Bishop as Dr. Ben Wood

Dorothy Malone as Alice Lorie

Lola Albright as Francie Bennet

Carl Benton Reid as Health Commissioner Ellis

Ludwig Donath as Dr. Cooper

Art Smith as Anthony Moss

Whit Bissell as Sid Bennet

Roy Roberts as the mayor

Connie Gilchrist as Belle, the landlord

Jim Backus as Willie Dennis

Richard Egan as Treasury Agent Owney

Harry Shannon as Police Officer Houlihan

Beverly Washburn as six-year-old Walda Kowalski

Billy Gray as Pinkie

Peter Virgo as Joe Dominic

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Produced by Robert Cohn Productions

It’s happened again: I have seen a film noir whose theme is oddly contemporary. The Glass Wall, which I wrote about in January, was a story about a refugee seeking asylum in the United States but is denied entrance because of a technicality (which could apply to the current debates about immigration around the world and to the Dreamers in the United States in particular). The Killer That Stalked New York involves a smallpox epidemic in New York City and the tactics needed to slow the spread of the disease. The distress at not being able to fight what starts out as an unknown disease and the need to overcome opposition to vaccination as the disease spreads sound all too familiar because of the need for vaccination and the current fears about pandemics.

Click here to see my blog post about The Glass Wall.

Panic about the spread of smallpox and the talk of it in The Killer That Stalked New York is reminiscent of the following, among many, many others:

◊ Flu pandemic in 1918

◊ HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s

◊ Ebola fever and Zika virus outbreaks in the 2000s

◊ Flu season of 2017–2018

Applicability to current events isn’t the only reason to see The Killer That Stalked New York. Evelyn Keyes plays the starring role of Sheila Bennet, and her performance is fantastic. I didn’t think that I would enjoy the film, but once I learned that Keyes was the lead, I was convinced. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The opening credits are shot against a dramatic silhouette background of a woman with a gun standing over a diminutive city skyline. The perspective is off, which is the first clue that The Killer That Stalked New York is a film noir. The voice-over narrator describes New York City as a survivor. The story begins in November 1947, when death arrives in the city in the form of Sheila Bennet (played by Keyes). She is followed by Treasury Agent Johnson because she’s suspected of smuggling diamonds into the country from Cuba. She is already sick with smallpox, although no one knows that yet. But it won’t be long before she will be pursued by doctors in addition to federal officers.

(This blog post about The Killer That Stalked New York contains spoilers.)

What follows is a surprisingly dramatic story about solving a crime involving smuggling and the mystery of a spreading smallpox epidemic. Viewers get to know Sheila Bennet pretty well, and she has many problems, in addition to being a smuggler and a smallpox carrier. Her husband, Matt Krane, is cheating on her, and the worst part is that Sheila’s sister Francie is his mistress. All these details are important in this short tragic film: All of them contribute to Sheila’s undoing in some way or another.

As I have already mentioned, the story includes the distress at not being able to fight what starts out as an unknown disease and the need to overcome opposition to vaccination once doctors have determined the type of disease. The parallels to other epidemics, both past and present, should resonate with viewers today, and it is one of the film’s details that really struck me. Here is part of a conversation between two doctors that could come from a film today or even a television series like House:

• Dr. Ben Wood: “What good is all our modern lifesaving equipment and all our hospitals? As far as that child [Walda Kowalski] is concerned, we might as well be back in the days when medicine was groping blindly. Those things were expected then, but now. For all our knowledge, we’re unable to add up a group of symptoms to mean anything. Symptoms are warnings. What are they trying to tell us?”

• Dr. Cooper: “Ben, suppose we were in those medieval days again. When plagues wiped out whole cities. Before X-ray, vaccine, and anesthesia. And the symptoms were a headache, backache, fever, and rash. What would they have meant?”

Walda Kowalski dies because she contracts smallpox and she has not been vaccinated for the disease. Dr. Ben Wood remarks, “If only Walda had been vaccinated.” The doctors treating the increasing number of smallpox patients enlist the help of the city’s mayor to start a campaign to vaccinate the inhabitants of the neighborhoods where the patients lived and finally the entire city. They meet some resistance to what a few New Yorkers see as strong-arm tactics to get them vaccinated. I wonder how many viewers today would see the sequence showing the vaccination distributions throughout the city and would be reminded of the antivaccination arguments made today. Doctors apparently heard similar arguments in 1947 that are made today about protecting citizens from what some perceived as government intrusion.

But seeing the remarkable similarities between past and present is not the only reason to see The Killer That Stalked New York. It is a great film noir with a great lead in Evelyn Keyes. It is a gripping story that changes from one about searching for a smuggler to one about stopping an unwitting killer. The film’s theme is remarkably current considering it was released almost seventy years ago.