The Killer That Stalked New York

I was going through my DVD collection and realized I had some gifts that I hadn't watched yet. One of them as a multi-disc collection called "Bad Girls Film Noir" (two volumes) and I was in the mood for something like that so popped in the first one, a strange film called The Killer That Stalked New York. True, the star of the film, Evelyn Keyes, is a femme fatale, but she's more like Typhoid Mary than Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

The film is a noir, sort of, but combined with a public service for vaccination, which was interesting given the current climate. Keyes plays a woman who has just arrived in New York from Cuba. She's smuggled diamonds for her no good husband (Charles Korvin), who's such a rat that he cheated on her with her sister and plans to run away with her with the diamond loot.

Keyes is trailed by a treasury agent, but she's got a bigger problem--she's sick. She stops in at a health clinic and told by the blandly handsome doctor (William Bishop) to get some further tests. In the meantime, Keyes interacts with a little girl who later comes down with smallpox.

Smallpox, of course, is one of the greatest killers of all diseases, and was completely eradicated in 1977. But in 1947, when the film is set (it was released in 1950), it was still an issue, the the film is based on a Cosmopolitan story about just such a scare in New York City. Polio was still a health crisis that scared the dickens out of parents, so this film surely would have resonated with audiences.

But it's not a very good one. Directed without much flair by Earl McEvoy, it has a noir look but is undercut by its propaganda about vaccinations--it can't make up its mind if its about diamond smugglers or one of those films they show in health class at school. Keyes, who was probably best known for her famous husbands (John Huston among them) isn't very interesting here.

The film does have a few actors who would later become famous, such as Jim Backus as a nightclub owner and Dorothy Malone as a nurse.