Panic in the City (USA, 1968) 97 min color DIR: Eddie Davis. PROD: Earle Lyon. SCR: Eddie Davis, Charles E. Savage. MUSIC: Paul Dunlap. DOP: Alan Stensvold. CAST: Howard Duff, Linda Cristal, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Anne Jeffreys, Oscar Beregi Jr., Gregory Morton, Dennis Hopper, John Hoyt. (United Pictures Corporation)
I’ve long been fascinated with the low-budget genre quickies produced in the late 1960s under the various umbrellas of United Pictures Corporation. These undemanding films (including Destination Inner Space, Cyborg 2087, Dimension 5, and The Destructors) mostly found distribution on television. As late as the 1990s, they were still filler on City TV’s “Late Great Movies”. (Our most important film education often came from whatever aired at 4:10 AM).
Generic in their art direction, flatly photographed, and employing a lot of veteran character actors for some marquee value, these movies (often released by Commonwealth United) are however fascinating for these very contradictions. Anachronisms when they were produced, their old-fashioned feel (helped in no small part by the veterans before and behind the camera) belonged to an earlier tradition. Their screenplays often had ideas and ambitions exceeding their budgets, but they also succeeded in making the commonplace appear unsettling. Their fantastic plots became more plausible, because they unfolded in the drab, generic locations of lounges, restaurants, city streets, offices, gas stations and supermarkets that are part of the viewers’ everyday landscapes.
In recent years Kino Lorber has released Tiger by the Tail, Cyborg 2087 and Dimension 5, and Olive Films put out Bamboo Saucer and The Girl Who Knew Too Much, all restored to widescreen aspect ratios. Previously, some other United titles were staples on VHS or DVD budget labels. One of these was Panic in the City, often seen on department store racks with Dennis Hopper’s picture on the cover.
One of the greatest shell games in the home video market is to sell a film from early in an actor’s career as though they were the lead attraction. Yes, Panic in the City “starring Dennis Hopper” was produced in between such counterculture delights as The Trip, The Glory Stompers or Easy Rider, in which the actor was featured prominently, but here he has a small, though vital role that advances the plot.
When a man with radiation burns is brought to the hospital, Hopper (as hired killer Goff) manages to talk his way into the patient’s room and kills him before the authorities are able to question him. Once NBI agent Dave Pomeroy (Howard Duff, perhaps better remembered to our generation for his roles in the TV series Flamingo Road and Knots Landing) is brought in to investigate, this film plays like a procedural with Cold War overtones.
Pomeroy discovers that man’s death is connected to a Dr. Cerbo (Oscar Beregi), who is gathering materials to assemble an atomic bomb for a madman named August Best (an over-the-top Nehemiah Persoff) who wishes to flatten the city of Los Angeles. The Argentinian beauty Linda Cristal (best remembered for the TV series The High Chaparral, and big-screen appearances in The Alamo and Mr. Majestyk) plays Dr. Paula Stevens, an expert on radiology and also a potential love interest for Pomeroy, although her role largely amounts to making dinner plans which always get cancelled at the last moment.
Although shot in colour, Panic in the City is perhaps evocative of the previous decade, when atomic-themed scenarios were more fashionable, and because it co-stars such familiar veterans as Anne Jeffreys, John Hoyt and Stephen McNally. (Blink, and you’ll miss a walk-on by future M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell as an orderly.) If the film feels out of the time in which it was made, and more like a TV-movie, it is perhaps because director Eddie Davis (who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles E. Savage) had a long resume of episodic television (Bat Masterson, Ripcord, Sea Hunt), and concluded his career with this and other United titles: That Lady From Peking, Color Me Dead, and It Takes All Kinds.
However, this plain presentation actually suits the material. Because the movie unfolds in locations so generic yet familiar (suburbs, strip plazas, machine shops), its suspense is more palpable, because it feels like the viewer’s own personal landscape is endangered. The film’s matter-of-fact presentation of the meticulous ways in which the saboteurs work in plain sight (Best, of unspecified though European origin, runs an art gallery as a front for his operations), generates more suspense than one may expect in such a modest programmer. Casting a 54-year-old-actor (often bespectacled) with an everyman quality enforces how Pomeroy’s job is anything but the exciting James Bond-like “spy-fi” so popular at the time, in such unglamourous activities as tediously staking out Cerbo’s house, and posing as a repairman while going door-to-door with Geiger counters looking for the bomb! Even an agent’s death feels “part of the job”.
The film works best in its visual moments, as in a pretty good car chase, and in the ingenious way in which Cerbo manages to elude the agents by slipping away in the trunk while his butler makes a run to the supermarket! The surprisingly downbeat finale, where the bomb is finally discovered in an unfinished basement of a suburban home, and our heroes have to race against time to remove it before it detonates (great shots of neighbours peering from behind closed doors), still haunts the memory for days later. Not bad for a programmer fated as filler for 2PM or 2AM. And for this, Panic in the City remains one of the better efforts released by the United Pictures conglomerate.