Chronicles of a Death Foretold


Class conflict, governmental malfeasance, disease and death: the issues swirling around the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans are also the themes of four memorable films set there, including two by Elia Kazan:


JFK is Oliver Stone's feverish retelling of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation into the murky depths of conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets, a doctor from the city's Public Health Service discovers a case of lethal pneumonic plague and must find its source within 48 hours before it turns into an epidemic.

Although Mardi Gras is the ostensible destination of the cross-country trip by the two Existentialist bikers in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, their journey comes to its metaphorical conclusion during a nightmarish acid trip in a crumbling cemetery.

The gentility and hypocrisy of the Old South, in the form of the fragile Blanche DuBois, comes face to face with the harsh realities of the New South and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, in Elia Kazan's film adaptation of Tennesse Williams' immortal A Streetcar Named Desire.

JFK
Oliver Stone, 1991
catalogue # DVD 446

Panic in the Streets
Elia Kazan, 1950
catalogue # VHS 287

Easy Rider
Dennis Hopper, 1969
catalogue # DVD 429

A Streetcar Named Desire
Elia Kazan, 1951
catalogue # DVD 539