Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

*** This review may contain spoilers *** It isn't a film-noir, more of a Drama or Thriller.The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) plays off as some turgid 1950's health department warning to the citizens of America that smallpox is on the loose. It starts off with a rough-voiced narrator giving us the goods on some dame who smuggled in diamonds from Cuba. Well, it seems she picked up something else, the smallpox. She visits many places and then starts an epidemic in Manhattan. The health department, staffed by idiots it seems and cantankerous old men who complain constantly, are trying to send flatfoot health department investigators to find out where it started from, I don't know why. Plus they want to inoculate each and every person in the five boroughs. These folks were geniuses.One interesting thing is for architecture buffs to look out for the ambiance, it was filmed both in New York City and Los Angeles, California. She arrives to the Pennsylvania Station (1910–63) in Manhattan, but the interiors don't look anything like it. it was probably a station in Los Angeles.Put in a pestiferous T-man (treasury agent) looking for the dame and a few stupid comments from gawkers and this makes for an even worse picture.They add some crime element to the film, with the dame who smuggled in diamonds from Cuba and her husband who double-crossed her. There's plenty of sanctimonious narration from the rough-voiced narrator and those 1950's "thank you" to all the departments involved ending credits.In all, it's really not that good, Panic in the Streets (1950) directed by Elia Kazan with Richard Widmark and Jack Palance, which had a similar story, did it much better.You'll recognize plenty of faces from TV and film.

This is a film about a smallpox epidemic in New York City, and the 'killer' is the disease. The title thus gives a false impression that this is a crime film. The film has a police-procedural mode of delivery, with a droning narrator, very much in the style of the FBI and police films of that time. The film is rather terrifying in what it depicts, and I would not hesitate to describe it as 'a scare film'. It was made in close cooperation with the federal government, and it has a hysterical 'reds under the beds' air about it, even though it is germs rather than reds who threaten the USA this time. The film was also released under the title FRIGHTENED CITY, and is based upon what must have been a pretty scary Colliers Magazine article by Milton Lehman (his only contribution to the cinema). The screenplay is by the former journalist Harry Essex, who two years previously scripted the Laurence Tierney film BODYGUARD (1948, see my review). Evelyn Keyes plays the lead, a woman named Sheila Bennett, who has just returned from Cuba ('which has no quarantine arrangement with the US', as a medical man complains in the film) carrying some smuggled diamonds and carrying something else as well, the disease smallpox. This is thus one of the early epidemic scare films, which were to become much more common many years later, such as OUTBREAK (1995) with Dustin Hoffman. In fact, it is the earliest epidemic scare film I can recall seeing, though I presume there must have been others. It must have been difficult to persuade many possible leading ladies to play Sheila Bennett, because she has to spend most of the film looking terrible as she gets worse and worse with the disease, which does not appeal to the vanity of most stars. It is very much to the credit of Evelyn Keyes that she was willing to do this and was not deterred by considerations of her 'image'. Evelyn was a very fascinating and pleasant person, highly intelligent. I knew her during the time she had her relationship with Jack Cushingham in London. I didn't see nearly enough of her, as I was keen to discuss things much more, and we did have some interesting chats about her former husbands John Huston and Artie Shaw. She talked about Artie a lot. I wish I could remember all those stories. Someone should have taped hours of interviews with her, because she was so well-informed and was never lost for words. She was very sophisticated and had seen it all and was prepared to say so. Anyone who survived marriage to John Huston had to have a strong character. She divorced Huston in February of the year this film came out. So maybe one reason why she looked so rough was because of that. After all, what is smallpox compared to being married to a sadist, for despite his buckets full of charm, he was dangerously disturbed. And speaking of Jack Cushingham (1919-1985), his IMDb credits are seriously deficient. THE EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN (1969), of which he was co-producer (it was by the way a terrible failure of a film), and QUACKSER FORTUNE HAS A COUSIN IN THE BRONX (1970), of which he was producer (a project concerning which I gave him not inconsiderable assistance), are not listed, because no one at IMDb has figured out that Jack Cushingham is in fact the same person as John S. Cushingham, for whom those two films are listed. The two entries need to be amalgamated into one. As someone who knew Jack very well many years ago, I feel I owe it to him to point this out for the historical record. Before being involved with Evelyn, Jack told me he had an affair with Joan Collins, and from time to time he would phone her and have long and friendly chats, even though they were no longer involved. He said what a wonderfully warm, friendly, and open person she was, and that she always liked to remain permanent friends with all the men who had ever been in her life. I was with him a couple of times when he phoned her, which was interesting, as they certainly were warm and friendly conversations, I can vouch for that. The fact that both Joan Collins and Evelyn Keyes found Jack interesting says a lot. For, as I said, Evelyn Keyes was really something, one of the strong women of Hollywood. As for this film, where she struggles with a deadly disease, I have a certain sympathy for people who survive epidemic diseases, for I once got cholera in China, though not in an epidemic, and I was only saved by less than two hours. (Once symptoms commence you only have between ten and twelve hours to live if not treated with massive rehydration and potassium. They had to inject 32 kilos of saline into me while they stuffed potassium pills in my mouth and injected potassium into the saline, which by the way makes your veins burn on the inside as if they are on fire, just in case you are interested.) My advice: stay at home, sleep in a plastic bubble, never go out, speak to no one, and don't use someone else's chopsticks. And just in case you think 'it can't happen to me', try watching this film. (On the subject of smallpox, the doctors informed my mother that she and I had inherited an immunity to it, as our many attempts to get vaccinated never 'took' and we never got scars on our arms like everybody else did. So I suppose some ancestor made it through a smallpox epidemic centuries ago and we inherited the antibodies. Strange but true. Maybe I should leave my blood to science.) If you watch this, don't eat popcorn, because you might choke.

"The Killer That Stalked New York" proves that America was just as germophobic and epidemic obsessed in 1950 as it is today.The germ in this particular movie is smallpox, but substitute anthrax or H1N1 and you've got present-day U.S. of A. Evelyn Keyes plays a woman smuggling diamonds in from Cuba who's carrying the disease but unaware that she has it. The longer she tries to hide and run from the law, the more people she exposes to the illness. The film is a weird hybrid of crime thriller and public service message. The diamond smuggling storyline is almost a MacGuffin, an excuse to shoe-horn around it lots of speeches about the vulnerability of a great city like New York to an epidemic and the importance of getting vaccinated against communicable diseases. Smallpox is personified into a malicious killer to the point that it becomes laughable. I half expected to see a smallpox germ itself lurking around a corner, twirling a silent movie villain mustache and giggling insanely.The movie doesn't even try to plug its many plot holes, the biggest one being an explanation of how Keyes manages to run around the city for days with smallpox while others she comes in contact with for a mere second seem to drop dead within hours.Grade: B

This is a really dark movie. Noir indeed. The title character is smallpox, brought into New York City unknowingly by Evelyn Keyes.She is on one mission when she arrives and on a rougher one after she's spoken to her no longer innocent sister. But she herself is not intentionally a killer. This doesn't mean she doesn't kill. It doesn't mean her presence somewhere among eight million other people doesn't throw the city into turmoil.Keyes is excellent. The supporting cast is very good too. There are several little-known people involved in this -- the director included. Don't be put off. It is a movie to be reckoned with! (And how nice to see a Columbia picture. Columbia and Republic turned out wonderful comedies and noirs; yet we hardly ever see them anymore.)