1959’s City of Fear has a strange plot.  Vince Edwards is an escaped convict who has a container he believes is full of heroin which he can resell for a fortune.  Instead, it is filled with Cobalt 60, a highly radioactive element.  It was being used in controlled experiments in the prison, which baffled me at first and then made my blood run cold.  It seems just like our prison system to be experimenting with radiation on the incarcerated.  It bothered me that I could imagine it still being done today.

In just the first few minutes of the runtime, I was wondering why Edwards would mistake the Cobalt 60 for heroin, and I wondered if a blind study was injecting inmates with one versus the other.  I can only assume he wasn’t actually in that program, since it seems he would take the opportunity to shoot up with the material at hand and give himself one truly hot shot.  Then again, that would make for an awfully short film.

When we first see Edwards, he is recklessly driving an ambulance.  In the passenger seat is his fellow escapee who is dying.  Edwards is indifferent.  Since we know nothing about these characters at this point, it looks like Edwards is simply the world’s worst, and cruelest, ambulance driver.

He pulls off the road and another car pulls over to offer assistance.  We learn later Edwards had killed that man, then stolen his car and identity.  He also torched the ambulance with that man and the fellow convict we saw before in it.

Edwards may be a psychopath, but he also has restraint and is a bit of a charmer.  He smooth talks his way through a police roadblock.   It helped that he had picked up a hitchhiking sailor the night before, so there is somebody who can attest to knowing Edwards in this guise, however briefly.  I was surprised that sailor will get out of the car alive in Los Angeles, though radiation exposure will simply mean a more drawn-out death.

Another person to be made ill by the contents of that cylinder is Patricia Blair.  As his girl, she mildly chastises him for breaking out, saying she would have waited for him while he did his time.  She will later have the only interesting line in the script, which is this, after a detective tells her to keep herself available: “What do you want, the key to my apartment?”

This is one astonishingly dull picture, which is surprising, as it has a killer unwittingly carrying a container full of radioactive material that could contaminate most of Los Angeles.  There are no scenes of mass panic and large-scale evacuations, because a production like this could not afford to stage such spectacles.  Instead, we learn how difficult it is to make extensive scenes of people running around with Geiger counters something which will hold the audience’s attention.  Scientist Steven Ritch scowling and scribbling nonsense on a blackboard is no more exciting.

I was surprised the music is composed by Jerry Goldsmith, and this was only his second film score.  We will see this in the opening credits, which are superimposed over a high-angle view of the city at night.  The film will circle back to that same footage for the end, though there is inexplicably a giant TV aerial in the foreground this time, as it appears to be towering over the city.  Now that is the movie I wish I could see instead: The TV Antenna that Ate Los Angeles.

Dir: Irving Lerner

Starring Vince Edwards, Steven Ritch, Patricia Blair

Watched as part of the Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray box set Columbia Noir #3