A beautiful blonde (Evelyn Keyes as Sheila Bennet) gets off a train in New York with some diamonds she smuggled from Cuba. A T-man (Barry Kelly) is in hot pursuit, but Sheila knows that and loses him at the hotel she checks into with the help of a bell hop. What Sheila doesn't know is that she has smallpox. She doesn't feel very well, but apparently like so many patient zeroes, she stays on her feet longer than many of the people that she infects manage to live.
So this is really two stories. The noir part is Sheila being betrayed by and then seeking vengeance against her duplicitous husband Matt - as in vowing to kill him - who got her to steal the jewels but deserted her after he got them. The other is semi-documentary in style about the epidemic of smallpox that Sheila unknowingly brings into New York. Actually, the smuggled diamonds are just a MacGuffin.
This is based on a true story about a Maine couple who brought smallpox into New York City in 1946, and the mass vaccination campaign that followed. So I guess the noir angle was brought in because people are just not going to buy a ticket to see a movie that is all about public health.
It is interesting to see how sprawling the public health network was in New York City, and probably elsewhere, at the time. That network has been decimated over time. It is also odd seeing the mayor of New York telling pharmaceutical company heads to break regulations in order to produce mass amounts of vaccine. Those are federal regulations today, and a mayor just can't do that.
You see the equivalents to today's pandemic - you have your antivaxxers, people who deny how one woman can infect millions until somebody explains it to him in a barber shop, and long lines of people who realize the threat clamoring for the vaccine. There is one funny art design detail - why does a public New York clinic need to wallpaper its office with "GET VACCINATED HERE" signs? I think people would notice the first sign they saw!
There are some future stars here -Dorothy Malone, Jim Backus, and Richard Egan, along with wonderful character actor Whit Bissell. If you wonder why the actor who brilliantly played the sleezy criminal Matt Krane, Charles Korvin, did not have a bigger career, he was blacklisted as a result of refusing to cooperate with HUAC.
So this is really two stories. The noir part is Sheila being betrayed by and then seeking vengeance against her duplicitous husband Matt - as in vowing to kill him - who got her to steal the jewels but deserted her after he got them. The other is semi-documentary in style about the epidemic of smallpox that Sheila unknowingly brings into New York. Actually, the smuggled diamonds are just a MacGuffin.
This is based on a true story about a Maine couple who brought smallpox into New York City in 1946, and the mass vaccination campaign that followed. So I guess the noir angle was brought in because people are just not going to buy a ticket to see a movie that is all about public health.
It is interesting to see how sprawling the public health network was in New York City, and probably elsewhere, at the time. That network has been decimated over time. It is also odd seeing the mayor of New York telling pharmaceutical company heads to break regulations in order to produce mass amounts of vaccine. Those are federal regulations today, and a mayor just can't do that.
You see the equivalents to today's pandemic - you have your antivaxxers, people who deny how one woman can infect millions until somebody explains it to him in a barber shop, and long lines of people who realize the threat clamoring for the vaccine. There is one funny art design detail - why does a public New York clinic need to wallpaper its office with "GET VACCINATED HERE" signs? I think people would notice the first sign they saw!
There are some future stars here -Dorothy Malone, Jim Backus, and Richard Egan, along with wonderful character actor Whit Bissell. If you wonder why the actor who brilliantly played the sleezy criminal Matt Krane, Charles Korvin, did not have a bigger career, he was blacklisted as a result of refusing to cooperate with HUAC.