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.

Wind River (Part II) (2017)

January 21, 2017 (Sundance Film Festival), August 4, 2017 (United States), release dates

Directed by Taylor Sheridan

Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan

Music by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Edited by Gary D. Roach

Cinematography by Ben Richardson

Jeremy Renner as Cory Lambert

Julia Jones as Wilma Lambert

Teo Briones as Casey Lambert

Graham Greene as Ben Shoyo

Elizabeth Olsen as Jane Banner

Gil Birmingham as Martin Hanson, Natalie’s father

Kelsey Chow as Natalie Hanson

Jon Bernthal as Matt Rayburn

Martin Sensmeier as Chip Hanson, Natalie’s brother

Tyler Laracca as Frank Walker

Gerald Tokala Clifford as Sam Littlefeather

James Jordan as Pete Mickens

Eric Lange as Dr. Whitehurst

Ian Bohen as Evan, deputy officer

Hugh Dillon as Curtis

Matthew Del Negro as Dillon

Tantoo Cardinal as Alice Crowheart, Wilma’s mother

Apesanahkwat as Dan Crowheart, Wilma’s father

Althea Sam as Annie Hanson, Natalie’s mother

Distributed by Acacia Entertainment

Produced by Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, Savvy Media Holding, Thunder Road Pictures, Film 44

This is my second post about Wind River, and this time I plan to focus on the writing, specifically the poem that is so important to the film. I could appreciate the beauty of the poetic language the first time that I saw Wind River. The poem itself is vital to the structure of the film, but its importance did not really strike me until I saw the film a second time. It is another reason, besides all the clues in the visuals, to see Wind River more than once.

Click here for my first blog post about Wind River.

The film opens with the words “INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS,” which fade away to a black screen, and viewers hear a woman’ voice-over reciting two and a half stanzas of a poem (see the full text of the poem at the end of this post):

There’s a meadow in my perfect world

where wind dances the branches of a tree

casting leopard spots of light across the face of a pond.

The tree stands tall and grand and alone,

[at this point, the black fades to reveal a woman running across a snowy field at night; she is crying]

shading the world beneath it.

. . . It is here, in the cradle of all I hold dear,

I guard every memory of you.

And when I find myself frozen in the mind of the real—

far from your loving eyes, I will return to this place,

close mine, and take solace in the simple perfection

of knowing you.

(This blog post about Wind River contains spoilers.)

About halfway through the film (at 00:58:37), viewers learn that the poem was written by Cory Lambert’s daughter Emily before she died, presumably suffering the same fate as Natalie Hanson, who is the woman running across a field of snow at the start of the film. Cory keeps a framed and illustrated copy of Emily’s poem on his wall, in tribute to his daughter. When Jane Banner, the FBI agent investigating Natalie Hanson’s murder, visits him to discuss their investigation, she finds the poem and asks about it. Cory tells her, “It’s what got her [Emily] accepted into the summer writing program at Colorado State.”

Later in the film, Cory Lambert follows the tracks from the Littlefeathers’ residence to an outcropping on a mountain, where he can see the oil rig, where Natalie’s boyfriend Matt Rayburn worked, in the distance.  Shots of Cory Lambert’s tracking are interwoven with shots of Jane Banner, the federal agent; Ben Shoyo, the tribal police chief; and three tribal police officers on their way to the oil rig to search Matt Rayburn’s trailer. On the soundtrack is a male voice whispering several lines from Emily’s poem and an extra line that was difficult to hear:

Far from your loving eyes,

in a place where winter never comes.

Far from your loving eyes,

all along the wind I run.

Far from your loving eyes,

I return to a place . . .

The fourth line is beautiful, and I just hope I heard it and transcribed it correctly. It’s the one line that is not part of Emily’s poem.

The oil rig is the scene of several acts of violence. It is what Natalie was running from the night of her death. The poem, written by her best friend Emily Lambert, seems to guide Emily’s father Cory toward the conclusion of his search and the conclusion of the investigation in general. The voice-over of some of the lines made this clear to me because the poem underscores his motivation for joining the investigation in the first place.

The writing is exquisite in Wind River. The fact that the words of Emily’s poem are meaningfully integrated throughout make the writing even more outstanding. The poem keeps the memory of both Emily and Natalie alive, and both are vitally important to the story and to Cory Lambert’s motivation. These two female characters were never very far from Taylor Sheridan’s thoughts, I would say, as he wrote the screenplay. And he integrates them into the narrative expertly to keep them in the viewers’ thoughts, too.

Emily Lambert and Natalie Hanson are important for another reason, which becomes clear in the last shot of the film. Cory Lambert and Natalie’s father Martin Hanson sit in the snow in front of Martin’s house. Their backs are to the camera, and viewers see them at a short distance, as though they are standing just inside Martin’s front door. Superimposed above the two men are the following words:

While missing person statistics are compiled for every other

demographic, none exist for Native American women.

When they fade, they are replaced by the following:

No one knows how many are missing.

Emily’s and Natalie’s stories may be fictional, but they are all too common in the United States. The even greater tragedy is that no one in the U.S. government is paying attention.

Here is the complete text of Emily Lambert’s poem from Wind River.

“A Meadow in my Perfect World”

by Emily Lambert

(or Taylor Sheridan? I couldn’t find anything online to indicate otherwise)

There’s a meadow in my perfect world

where wind dances the branches of a tree

casting leopard spots of light across the face of a pond.

The tree stands tall and grand and alone,

shading the world beneath it.

There will come a day when I rest

against its spine and look out over a valley

where the sun warms, but never burns . . .

I will watch leaves turn

green, then amber, then crimson.

Then no leaves at all . . .

But the tree will not die

For in this place, winter never comes . . .

It is here, in the cradle of all I hold dear,

I guard every memory of you.

And when I find myself frozen in the mind of the real—

far from your loving eyes, I will return to this place,

close mine, and take solace in the simple perfection

of knowing you.