Black Death: Kate Jackson Fights the Plague

Imagine if Charlie dispatched his Angels to defeat pneumonic plague: Jill would’ve made out with it to create a diversion while Sabrina and Kelly broke into a locked medicine cabinet under cover of night to retrieve a cache of critical antibiotics like streptomycin. Then they’d sneak up on the plague, there might be a karate-chop or two and a couple of hokey one-liners after force-feeding it medication, and we’d cut to Charlie chuckling “Good work, Angels! That Yersinia pestis never saw you coming.”

Kate Jackson has a tougher time protecting the populace in Black Death (1992, also known as Quiet Killer), assisted not by comely crossing guards but an underfunded New York City Department of Health. As Dr. Nora Hart, the agency’s chief epidemiologist, her gal Friday is Dr. Jake Prescott (Jeffrey Nordling), a fresh-off-the-bus Indiana transplant whose corn-fed naïveté makes no sense in the context of his occupation: epidemiologists tend to be pretty well-versed in the gritty realities of urban living.

In adapting The Black Death, a 1978 novel (with a terrific paperback cover) by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr, screenwriter I.C. Rapaport — whose credits include a Hank Williams Jr. biopic and the Dom DeLuise oddity Happy — faces an unusual challenge: how do you make pneumonic plague sexy? The obvious answer is you can’t; delirium and hacking up blood tend to spoil the mood. But that’s mostly why Jake is there, to soften Nora by giving her a potential love interest as she races against time (and political pressure) to save the universe in a frenzied five-day span.

“This is the worst disease the world has ever known. It’s wiped out entire civilizations,” she tells Dr. Vincent Califano (Jerry Orbach), New York City’s director of health, who initially minimizes her concerns; he’s worked plague epidemics in Africa that were successfully contained. Indeed, that’s her point — though no vaccine exists for pneumonic plague, it has a high survival rate as long as it’s quickly treated. And time is of the essence in the city that never sleeps, particularly when it’s in the middle of a sanitation strike and a week away from hosting the Democratic National Convention.

If you’ve seen Someone I Touched, Cloris Leachman’s STI classic, you’re already familiar with contact-tracing. Jackson spends much of Black Death doing just that, starting with patient zero, Sara Dobbs (Kathleen Robertson, later of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Gregg Araki fame). Unaware of her infection, Dobbs traveled by air and exposed others, including a Park Avenue doorman and fellow passenger Calvin Phillips (Howard Hesseman), a philandering congressman whose obsession with delivering a DNC speech about “greed and self-centeredness, a disease not of the body but of the soul,” boasts some of Rapaport’s silliest work.

The specter of AIDS looms over Black Death; it’s referenced several times but in ways that feel insufficient given the state of the crisis in the early ’90s and its impact on New York City. We meet interesting characters willing to risk their lives to protect the public and question why director Sheldon Larry finds them less compelling than Dr. Lipsky (Kristina Nicoll), an ER physician who might not have to yell “Dammit!” so much if she knew how to properly perform CPR or when intubation is preferable to tracheostomy. (My wife also said to mention “That’s not what a hemorrhagic rash looks like.”) Orbach, Chip Zien and Alma Martinez are underutilized, though Martinez’s character at least has an arc more absorbing than “hails from Indiana.”

Unfortunately for Jackson, who was attempting to resume her career and allay concerns about her health following a recurrence of cancer, Black Death’s worst-written scenes involve Nora’s outbursts in private with Jake. She soldiers on without help from Larry (Family of Cops III: Under Suspicion, Charles Bronson’s last film credit), whose abrupt editing makes the incongruity of those moments stand out all the more. A film deserving of her talents would’ve focused less on Hesseman’s canoodling or the Village Voice reporter embedded in the hospital and more on Hart’s genuinely exciting work. There’s a gripping movie hidden within Black Death, you just need a microscope to see it.

… But wait, there’s more!

Kate Jackson has the funniest and most devoted fans of any actor I write about here, as I learned after posting a review of Thin Ice. Since then I’ve covered Killer Bees, Death Cruise, Satan’s School for Girls, Death at Love House, Inmates: A Love Story, The Silence of Adultery, The Cold Heart of a Killer, the “Angels Unchained” episode of Charlie’s Angels, and her cameo in Sweet Deception.

Check back occasionally for more Jackson content, because the plan is to survey her TV movie career in its entirety — even 1992’s Homewrecker, in which she voiced a deranged computer, and the ill-fated Arly Hanks pilot. I intend to do this for other telefilm titans as well but will probably reach the milestone with her first. Why? She genre-hopped more than her contemporaries, which keeps things lively. Her comedic presence was also unique among actors on ‘jiggle TV’ programs; she was a ’30s and ’40s screwball spitfire in ’70s attire, as we’ll discuss when we tackle Topper, her 1979 remake of the Cary Grant classic.

Streaming and DVD availability

Black Death is currently out-of-print on DVD but can be found on YouTube. The video quality isn’t great, as you can tell from these screenshots, but beggars can’t be choosers.

^{Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.}

Cranky Lesbian

Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.

crankylesbian.com