For his final Fox picture, Kazan contributed one of the strongest entries in the studio's popular semi-documentary cycle, a grippingly realistic account of police and government efforts to contain a near outbreak of bubonic plague in New Orleans. Often taken as an allegorical panegyric for big government, Panic in the Streets nevertheless avoids the cold abstraction typical of the semi-documentaries by rendering vivid its non-studio locations in working-class and immigrant New Orleans and by giving ample screen time to the private, domestic life of Richard Widmark's harried public health official. Noteworthy as well is the casting of Brando's former Streetcar understudy Jack Palance, in his first screen appearance, as a snarling, predatory smuggler, eccentrically paired with comic Zero Mostel as his blustery sidekick.