Plot
Arriving at New York City's Pennsylvania Station after a trip to Cuba, Sheila Bennet, who is smuggling $50,000 worth of diamonds into the country, realizes that she is being followed by the authorities. She mails the diamonds to her husband Matt Krane instead of carrying them around, and then tries to shake the Treasury agent following her.
Feeling sick, Sheila nearly faints on the street, and a police officer takes her to a local clinic. While there, she encounters a little girl and inadvertently infects her. Sheila is misdiagnosed as having a common cold, and she returns home. When the girl is admitted to the hospital, she is diagnosed with smallpox.
Matt, who has been cheating on Sheila with her sister Francie, attempts to abscond without either of them when the diamonds finally arrive through the mail. However, his fence cannot buy the diamonds because the police are searching for them. Matt will have to wait for ten days for the cash, so he cannot leave New York. Sheila confronts Francie, who later kills herself because of Matt's betrayal, and Sheila seeks revenge.
Finding a growing number of smallpox victims, city officials attempt to vaccinate everyone in New York to prevent an epidemic, but they quickly exhaust their supply of serum, causing a panic in the city. Tracking the victims, agents realize that the disease carrier and the diamond smuggler are the same person. Sheila, increasingly sick but unaware that she has smallpox, continues to elude capture. She returns to the doctor at the clinic for more medicine. After the doctor explains her illness and tries to convince her to surrender, she shoots him in the arm and escapes.
Sheila eventually finds Matt, who tries to escape from the police but falls from a building ledge to his death. Sheila nearly attempts to drop herself from the ledge until the doctor informs her that the little girl whom she had met has died. Sheila surrenders to the authorities and, before succumbing to the disease, provides information on the people whom she had contacted.
Reception
In a contemporary review for The New York Times , critic Bosley Crowther called the film "potentially but not sufficiently intriguing" and wrote: "By bringing his cameras to New York and filming realistic hospital scenes, mass vaccinations and local details, Director Earl McEvoy has achieved a respectable simulation of the anxiety of a community when confronted with a possible plague. And he has managed to get some fascination into the desperate devices by which the health authorities, headed by a young physician, attempt to pinpoint the fatal carrier. But, unfortunately, the script of Harry Essex, based on a factual magazine piece, has a bad tendency to ramble and to confuse two separate hunts. And the performances of the principal characters, while adequate, have little punch." [2]
Reviewer Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News wrote: "'The Killer' is not as dramatic, realistic or as brilliantly directed as 'Panic in the Streets,' the 20th Century-Fox film based on such a predicament. However, it has a reasonable amount of suspense ... The story that holds this frantic search together is more imaginative than realistic but it is interesting to see how such a situation is controlled by the health department." [3]
Critic Mae Tinée of the Chicago Tribune also compared the film negatively against Panic in the Streets , writing: "While authentic background provides a touch of the genuine, the film in over-all skill does not compare with its predecessor. The script writers are included to belabor their points and to introduce a maximum of complications into the plot." [4]
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