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Last night, A Person to Be Pseudonymed Later and I went to the Noir City DC festival and attended a screening of The Killer Who Stalked New York (1950).
The basic premise is that a woman, who being pursued by Customs Officers because she's smuggling stolen diamonds, comes back from a trip to Cuba. She comes back to her husband, who is also involved in the diamond smuggling, and unbeknownst to her he's having an affair with her sister. Unbeknowst to everyone, she's picked up smallpox. She evades the Customs Officers persueing her, but winds up sick on the street and is taken to a public health clinic, where the doctor misdiagnosis her, though not before she interacts with a child in the waiting room.
The movie is pretty heavy-handed, and some of the "it's so frustrating that we can't beat this even with all the modern medical technology of 1947!" is more than a little awkward in retrospective, but it's definitely a good attempt to tell a noir story with an interesting twist. The vaccination effort running into supply shortages was also a nice touch, though the mayor telling the vaccine manufacturing executives to break regulations in order to get more vaccine made had me rolling my eyes; FDA safety regulations were only 9 years old at the time, and no one in the pharmaceutical industry would have been ignorant of why they existed. The idea that you could get a sewing machine company to make smallpox innocculation needles was also Hollywood Logic at its finest.
The movies suffers a little bit because the make-up technology of the time isn't up to producing a convincing smallpox rash -- the main character does manage to look ill, through pasty, unflattering make-up, but none of the other characters who fall ill show any sign of the characteristic rash. The only time there's convincing smallpox on the screen is the scene in the military lab with a high-powered microscope, and I'm pretty sure the actor who said "if you survive, you wind up looking like this" was actually a smallpox survivor, because that pebbly skin texture would have been impossible for the movie make-up of the time.
Still, it was pretty obvious why the Noir Foundation put this movie on the roster, and I did enjoy it a lot.
The basic premise is that a woman, who being pursued by Customs Officers because she's smuggling stolen diamonds, comes back from a trip to Cuba. She comes back to her husband, who is also involved in the diamond smuggling, and unbeknownst to her he's having an affair with her sister. Unbeknowst to everyone, she's picked up smallpox. She evades the Customs Officers persueing her, but winds up sick on the street and is taken to a public health clinic, where the doctor misdiagnosis her, though not before she interacts with a child in the waiting room.
The movie is pretty heavy-handed, and some of the "it's so frustrating that we can't beat this even with all the modern medical technology of 1947!" is more than a little awkward in retrospective, but it's definitely a good attempt to tell a noir story with an interesting twist. The vaccination effort running into supply shortages was also a nice touch, though the mayor telling the vaccine manufacturing executives to break regulations in order to get more vaccine made had me rolling my eyes; FDA safety regulations were only 9 years old at the time, and no one in the pharmaceutical industry would have been ignorant of why they existed. The idea that you could get a sewing machine company to make smallpox innocculation needles was also Hollywood Logic at its finest.
The movies suffers a little bit because the make-up technology of the time isn't up to producing a convincing smallpox rash -- the main character does manage to look ill, through pasty, unflattering make-up, but none of the other characters who fall ill show any sign of the characteristic rash. The only time there's convincing smallpox on the screen is the scene in the military lab with a high-powered microscope, and I'm pretty sure the actor who said "if you survive, you wind up looking like this" was actually a smallpox survivor, because that pebbly skin texture would have been impossible for the movie make-up of the time.
Still, it was pretty obvious why the Noir Foundation put this movie on the roster, and I did enjoy it a lot.
