Along with "Panic in the Streets," "The Killer That Stalked New York" is another film from 1950 Hollywood about the search for a murderous carrier of disease--in this case, smallpox. It becomes clear early on that this B-picture is the lesser of the two films. It's attempts at noir stylization tend to be hamfisted. The narrator isn't a character and is generally pointless, if not annoying. The entire criminal subplot involving betrayal, a love triangle and smuggled diamonds isn't intriguing. That the blonde femme fatale is literally and unintentionally killing people by carrying, unbeknownst to her, smallpox is an unfortunately kind of an amusing twist on the trope. Moreover, the doctors' surprised reactions to smallpox appearing in New York would verge on the laughable, as they repeatedly exclaim shock at the prospect that such a then-still-not-eradicated disease could be found in their civilized sphere of the world, if it didn't seem prescient given today's real-world pandemic and its effects on the city, or had there not actually been a smallpox outbreak and mass vaccination program in New York in 1947. Much of the movie merely plays out like an advertisement for vaccinations. It figures, too, that for all the characters' fears of the death toll the disease will wrought, the only character that we actually see die from it--and not only hear about--is a Black man.
Review of The Killer That Stalked New York
