City of Fear (Orbit Productions, Columbia, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I watched the presentation on Turner Cassic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show of a 1959 movie called City of Fear, a quasi-noir in which escaped criminal Vince Ryker (Vince Edwards) steals a metal canister from the San Quentin prison hospital. He thinks the canuster contains a million dollars’ worth of heroin, but it actually contains radioactive cobalt-60 in sufficient quantities that it could wipe out almost the entire population of Los Angeles, where he ends up after fleeing from the Northern California prison and murdering his fellow escapee and at least one passer-by he kills to steal his car. When he gets to L.A. he meets up with his former girlfriend, Lucy Marlowe (Patricia Blair) for a hot sexual encounter after he’s been in stir for two years. Meanwhile, the L.A. police, led by Chief Jensen (Lyle Talbot, essentially on parole from Ed Wood) and their nuclear consultant, Dr. John Wallace (Steven Ritch,who also co-wrote the film with Robert Dillon), mount an all-out search for Vince before he can open the canister and release its deadly contents, killing millions of Angelenos in the process. Though Eddie Muller surprisingly didn’t mention the connection, the film is an obvious reworking of Panic in the Streets (1950), in which U.S. Public Health Service Drl Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) is determined to catch a criminal because, unbeknownst to him, he’s carrying the germs that cause plague. Unfortunately, there’s a huge gap in quality between Panic in the Streets and City of Fear, mostly due to the directors: Panic in the Streets got Elia Kazan and City of Fear got Irving Lerner.

It also doesn’t help that Vince Ryker isn’t a particularly interesting villain – he’s basically just a thug and one misses the moral ambiguity of the great films noir – and in fact this is one cops-and-robbers movie in which the cops are considerably more interesting characters than the robber. About the only aspect of the film that makes it thematically noir is the shoe store of Eddie Crown (Joseph Mall), who’s really Vince’s former boss in the illegal drug trade and whose body, after Vince kills him, is discovered by an ordinary customer, Jeanne (Cathy Browne). The best aspects of City of Fear are Lucien Ballard’s great cinematography – he manages to give the film a convincing noir “look” even though, reflecting the increasing portability of film equipment in the 1950’s, much of it is shot outdoors in real locations instead of the studio constructs of previous noirs; and the febrile musical score of Jerry Goldsmith (only his second feature-film credit), which sounds more like a score from a 1970’s film than the norm for 1959. Aside from those aspects, City of Fear is yet another mediocre movie with a central premise that could have been the basis for a great film. Even the final comeuppance, in which Vince dies in the street from radiation poisoning, still clinging to the illusion that the canister contains heroin and it will make him a fortune – doesn’t really have the sense of tragedy Lerner, Ritch and Dillon were clearly hoping for. And one wonders not only why the container was made of steel (which allowed the radioactivity to leak out and slowly poison Vince) instead of lead (which wouldn't have) but why the team of police and scientists, who throw a blanket over Vince’s corpse and put a radiation symbol on top of it, didn’t bring a lead box to place the steel canister in and remove it safely.