Tribhuvan University

Portrayal of Stereotypical Disease-bearing Immigrant in Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets

A Term-Paper Submitted to Prof. Dr. Anand Sharma, Department of English, Tribhuvan

University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in
English Literature

Submitted by

Anand Gurung

Roll No: 26

August 18, 2022

Introduction (Thesis Statement):

The verbal attacks (racial slurs) and even physical assaults faced by Asian Americans (of

Chinese and East Asian descent) and other immigrant communities in the U.S, Canada, Europe,

and even neighboring India (where mostly Assamese and North East Indians were targeted)

during the global COVID-19 pandemic have again laid bare an ugly facet of modern world and

humanity. That facet being the tendency of the general public (or the majority) to blame the

immigrants and ethnic minorities for all the problems and calamities (both natural and man-

made) plaguing them and their society. And this predisposition is aptly depicted in the the movie

Panic in the Streets, a 1950 American film directed by Elia Kazan for Twentieth Century Fox.

Therefore, this research paper critically analyzes the movie’s portrayal of an immigrant as a

bearer of disease and pestilence and how they are vicitimized and subjected to ridicule,

suspicion, and deceit. For this, I will do a close examination of the opening scenes of the movie

that starts in a seedy bar in the equally dingy and dimly lit dockside of New Orleans, an

American city known for its Jazz music and festivals, including few other connecting scenes

where the main protagonist is seen arguing with sceptic city officials, indifferent policemen,
nosy journalists and oblivious public, among others, to convince them that they have just forty-

eight hours to save New Orleans from the menacing pneumonic plague. To do that, it is

important to go through and interpret the movie’s visual form, background music, texture,

structure, color and content, including the inclinations of the characters amidst their general

surroundings.

Movie Analysis

At first glance, the noir classic Panic in the Streets appears to be a police procedural movie

whose plot revolves around Lieutenant Commander Clinton Reed, a U.S. Public health service

doctor, and police captain called Tom Warren racing against time to prevent an epidemic of

pneumonic plague which might possibly spread and devastate the whole country.

Scene 1: The visibly ill man starts to leave the card game he was playing with gangsters shortly after arriving in
New Orleans

The title sequence of the movie begins with a rather gaudy, ominously dramatic music, acting as

a sort of a prelude to the subject matter dealt in the movie: the threat posed by a fast spreading,

deadly disease. The camera moves through a glittering, neon-lit streets of an American city

(which we know later to be New Orleans) by night. The movie’s night-time scenes accentuated

by its b/w (black & white) film automatically give a noir feel and texture to the movie; and
rightly so because a major part of the story also revolves around crime, decadence, distrust, and

moral ambiguity. The movie begins with a black car pulling up in front of what appears to be a

club where a jazz song is being performed by a black singer and people are seen entering it

nonchalantly. This is a kind of scene setting—a setting in sleazier ghettoes of Blacks, Hispanics,

and other non-white minority communities -- which usually forebodes, at least in many

Hollywood movies, a major crime or an act of depravity in the offing.

The camera slowly cuts to a man opening the windows at the upper floors of the club to breathe

some fresh bit of air. Suffering visibly from shortness of breath and a flu-like illness, this well-

dressed man in tie and pin-striped suit starts to leave the card game he was playing muttering

under his breath that he feels cold and sick, collects the cash he has won, and despite angry

protests from the other cardplayers who are clearly sore losers, waddles out of the bar like a

drunken-man. The sick man is relentlessly pursued by three villainous cardplayers one of whom

is a tall, menacing looking Gangster named Blackie, and is eventually cornered at an empty

railway warehouse and killed. They take the money and dispose the body on the docks. This is

how the opening scene of the movie ends, in a clear, fast-paced and direct manner of a crime-

thriller.

Only that the opening scene is not so clear and direct as it first appears to be. After the police fish

the dead man’s body from the dock the next day and send it to the coroner, it is learnt that the

homicide victim is an index case, or the first identified case of a pneumonic plague (a severe

lung infection caused by pulmonary version of bubonic plague) which might take the form of an

epidemic in a day or two if all those who met the man or came in contact with his dead body are

not traced and inoculated. Thus begins a fervent, massive investigation to determine the victim’s

identity, his comings and goings and the people he met during the past few days, and find the
murderers who killed him (as they are germ carriers and possible spreaders of the disease) in

order to save New Orleans from the plague. And this manhunt should be done under the tight

cover of secrecy so as not to alarm the press (but it does indeed spark the attention of one nosy

journalist), because reports of a plague might terrorize the city and cause mass panic in a large

city.

Scene 2: Reed and Warren interviewing a Greek restaurant owner during their investigation

In fact, the often-recurring motif in disaster movies in Hollywood is of a disease-bearing

immigrants from the East or the implied notion that all major epidemic, disease and illnesses

have their origins in the East or in the impoverished corners of Africa, as seen in medical thrillers

like Contagion (a movie released in 2011 which shows an American woman arriving home in

Minneapolis after getting infected with a deadly virus during a business trip in Hong Kong),

Outbreak (a 1995 American medical disaster movie that focuses on an outbreak of ebolavirus in

an African country Ziare and then later spread in a town in California) and World War Z (a 2013

zombie apocalypse movie in which South Korea is depicted as a country where the first report of

zombies occurrs).
Although this action-packed movie is nicely acted and directed and the matter-of-fact contact-

tracing depicted in it gives it an almost documentary-like realism, the main premises of the

movie – of a stereotypical disease-carrying foreigner or an immigrant as sources of infection and

other communicable diseases like smallpox and cholera -- is rather dubious and only contributes

to xenophobic stigmatization of immigrants and marginalized communities. The fast-paced

investigation later reveals the identity of the dead man to be an Armenian named Kochak who

had arrived illegally in New Orleans from Algeria aboard a merchant ship with multinational

crew and had hanged out at an immigrant-owned restaurant before being gunned down at what

appears to be a coffee warehouse. However, the ruthless killing of an immigrant by local

gangsters inclined to rob him off his money and the sheer apathy shown by the city police

officials the next day towards investigating the murder case speaks volumes of the way the

American society feels about immigrants and their status in the country, something that is only

portrayed realistically by the movie. What it does is only attempt to portray immigrants and

immigrant communities in poor light by playing up the revolting stereotype that they are both

harbingers and spreaders of plagues and disease. Even the victimization or murder of the

immigrant named Kochak is of little interest to the city officials; and a manhunt is ensued against

his killers only because they might spread the dangerous disease they contracted from him and

not because they are ruthless murderers of an innocent immigrant.

Therefore, this finely made thriller of a movie, upon closer observation, seems to have fallen into

the usual trap of scapegoating immigrants and minorities, as do many Hollywood movies of that

era; and something that still goes on in film industries around the world in a much more subtle

form to this day.

 Works Cited

Panic in the Streets. Directed by Elia Kazan, performance by Richard Widmark, Jack Palance,
and Paul Douglas, Twentieth Century Fox, 1950.

Outbreak. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, performance by Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, and
Morgan Freemen, Warner Bros, 1995.

Contagion. Directed by Steven Soderberg, performance by Marion Contillard, Matt Damon, and
Gwyneth Paltrow, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2011.

World War Z. Directed by Marc Forster, performance by Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, and Daniella
Kertesz, Paramount Pictures, 2013