Earl McEvoy

(On Cable TV, February 2021) If, like me, you sometimes think of “Hollywood movies” as a vast multi-thousand-item collection of nearly every topic to have fascinated American history from 1920ish onward, it stands to reason that you can find anything and everything in those archives. So it is that even the unprecedented, history-making COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21+ can find an unlikely precedent in… a film noir? That’s right: now that you’ve seen Contagion and Outbreak, have a look at The Killer That Stalked New York, an uneasy 1950 mixture of public health announcements and criminal thriller plot. Based on the true life but often forgotten 1947 New York City smallpox scare, it’s a film that follows the detection of smallpox in Manhattan, brought in the city from Cuba by a woman involved in a mixture of diamond thievery and lurid murder. But that film-noir plot is often shoved in the background, as director Earl McEvoy details the heroic efforts of public health officials, doctors and policemen in tracing the infection, vaccinating New Yorkers (despite ever-present skepticism) and trying to save everyone who contracted the disease. In many ways, The Killer That Stalked New York is not a particularly good film noir: The plot is thin, the two disparate parts of the whole don’t quite mesh, and the characters take a back-seat to the didactic requirements of the script. On the other hand, well, it’s completely engrossing: The fact-based depiction of how New York City reacts to the threat of a smallpox epidemic makes for a fascinating medical procedural, and the historical footage is simply wonderful. It’s an eloquent reminder that pandemics are nothing new, and that we once lulled ourselves into a false sense of security despite ample historical precedent. It’s definitely worth a watch right now, although I hope it becomes quite a bit less relevant soon enough.