I am just going to say this at the beginning of this review to get it out of the way: this movie is pretty mediocre. If you see it, maybe you'll think differently but for me personally, it didn't really do anything interesting that sets it apart from other noirs. It does have one saving grace though, and that is the fact that it involves a disease as a crucial plot point. Up until pretty recently, smallpox was a disease that crippled entire areas because of how infectious and dangerous it was. Smallpox is a truly horrible illness, because it is almost as transmissable as a cold but 1 out of every 3 who have it die. Many people who survived it were left with scars and some even went blind. Thankfully, cases of it started to taper off in the 1900s and smallpox was declared completely eradicated in 1980, one out of only 2 diseases to be wiped off the face of the earth. Still, there are samples of it in labs located in the US and Russia. The reason why I'm mentioning all this is because smallpox plays a pivotal role in this movie's story. The story is about a girl named Sheila Bennet who goes to New York armed with thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. The cops suspect something is wrong and start to shadow her, but not before she starts sending them to her husband. Later, Sheila starts to feel violently ill and goes to a clinic where she meets a young girl. She doesn't know it yet, but by touching her, she essentially ends her life. Sheila is dismissed since there doesn't seem to be anything medically wrong with her, but the young girl is found to harbor the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Sheila's husband meanwhile is going out with another woman and wants to leave as soon as the diamonds get to him, but he finds this rather difficult because the cops are trailing them. Her husband's new girlfriend kills herself, which makes Sheila seek her husband out to kill him. While all this goes on, the city is getting overwhelmed by clusters of smallpox cases popping up all over manhattan and every other borough. The authorities eventually run out of vaccines and have to start drafting doctors. Sheila still has no idea what kind of illness she has. At the end, she comes face to face with her husband again and makes him fall out a window, killing him. Sheila is told that the young girl she met at the clinic is dead, and Sheila herself dies of smallpox shortly after. If this movie does anything well, it makes me glad that I didn't live in this time period. For now, smallpox is gone forever, and it was arguably worse to have than cancer. The movie does a good job of conveying a sense of urgency as more and more cases become known in the city, and how even doctors seem helpless in the midst of it. The movie itself is also based on the real life occurrence in 1947 that marked the last smallpox cases in America. Eugene Le Bar, who made his living selling rugs in Maine, was taking a bus in Mexico City with his wife to travel back to New York. Shortly after, Le Bar became ill with a rash and neck pain. After being treated in Manhattan, the doctors didn't suspect smallpox because he was already vaccinated, but it killed him on March 10. A woman named Carmen was also infected and killed, but that was it. Two deaths in all. Since then, we can live happily knowing that there will be no more smallpox outbreaks.
