In honor of American landscapes at risk

As the movie opens, we see a group of gangsters playing cards in some cheap hotel room. Blackie (Jack Palance) is the boss of the gang, Fitch (Zero Mosel) is his go-for guy, and Poldi (Guy Thomajan) is another gang member. When Poldi's cousin wants to drop out of the card game because he is sick, Blackie doesn't want him to leave since he is too far ahead in the game. When he does leave, the gang chases him though the city and down to the train tracks where he is shot and left. The police discover his body the next day and have it taken to the Coroner's office for an autopsy....



We first get to know Lieutenant Commander Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) and his family in the next scene. 'Clint' and his wife, Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes), have money problems (and bill collectors) which worry them. But, right now, Clint is trying to take some time off from work to spend it his young son who he hardly ever sees because of his job...



When the coroner's autopsy reveals that the man's body is loaded with pneumonic plague---a disease related to bubonic plague but more serious since it can be so easily contracted from sneezing, sputum, or simple contact--the Coroner's office calls in Clint to handle the possible effects of a ravaging plague epidemic. Clint immediately calls for help from the NOPD. He needs them to help quickly find, and contain, the source of the plague before it spreads.



Clint is teamed with a cynical Police Captain, Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), who doesn't care much for doctors or Navy men. (In fact, though Clint's uniform may look like that of a Navy officer, the US Public Health Service and the Navy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.) Tom and Clint soon learn to work together as they realize each other's roles in the almost impossible mission of finding where the dead man came from while keeping their search 'under wraps' to prevent any possible panic. Added to the difficulty of finding where the dead man came from is the fact that his body, and therefore the dead man's ID, was immediately incinerated to prevent contagion. Also, they have to work fast since the incubation period is only 48 hours.



As Clint and Tom chase down clues, they are eventually led to a restaurant in a Greek neighborhood. They find out that the restaurant owner's wife had suddenly died of a high fever. This brings them closer to the plague's source than they had ever been; it brings them close to where Poldi in now lying sick in his mother's apartment. Poldi's mother had ordered a nurse, who had reported his symptoms to a local hospital and ordered an ambulance.



On the other hand, when Blackie and Fitch find Poldi, they believe that he and his cousin had been into something with a VERY big payoff. (After all—in their minds--why else wold the whole police department be looking SO hard to find Poldi and his cousin?) Blackie assumes that Poldi's cousin must have been in on a huge drug haul and Poldi must know about it. They try to pump Poldi for information before he dies. But, he is too sick to tell them anything. As Blackie and Fitch try to carry Poldi out of his mother's upstairs apartment, they meet Clint and Tom on the steps, throw Poldi down the steps, and are chased by the police.



The final running foot-chase sequence, with the police in hot pursuit of Blackie and Fitch, is one of the best of it kind in film noir! The foot-chase takes us to the docks and in the warehouses and back streets of New Orleans. The two gangsters are seen on the levees, structures, and substructures of the once-famous gulf port city.



The noir shots of Blackie and Fitch (Palance and Mosel) running across structures, popping up and dropping down from one level of a coffee and banana warehouse to another is almost visually poetic. In fact, they remind us of rats crawling along beams, bridges and other structures (occasionally falling in the swampy water only to get up and run some more).



The rat analogy reminds us of the plague that ships sometime bring into ports and refocuses us on WHY the two are being chased in the first place: to stop and control an possible plague epidemic. After Fitch has been shot dead, the final rat-plague analogy is brought home as we see Blackie climbing a fruit freighter's line. He falls to his death, not by a bullet from the police, but by the line's rat catcher.