CITY OF FEAR (1959)

Vince Ryker (Vince Edwards, pictured) and a fellow prisoner have just pulled off an escape from San Quentin. As Ryker speeds down the road in a stolen car, his friend has a heart attack and dies in the front seat. Vince ditches the car, steals another one after killing the driver (events we don't see), and on the way to Los Angeles to meet up with his lover June (Patricia Blair), picks up a hitchhiking sailor to help him get past any suspicious cops. Dropping the sailor off, Vince has his rendezvous with June in a cheap motel and shows her the canister full of raw heroin, used in a prison experiment, that he has stolen from the prison. His plan is to sell it and get far away, but what he doesn't know, and the cops do, is that the canister is actually filled with highly radioactive Cobalt-60. The narrative shifts to the police as they send out cops with Geiger counters, hoping to track down Ryker. Even though the canister remains closed (despite Ryker trying to open it), trace amounts of the Cobalt are picked up by the Geiger counters, and he winds up potentially sickening those around him. The rest of the film is a tense cat-and-mouse chase around town with Ryker getting sweaty, sick, and weak, still not knowing what he's carrying. I’ll watch Vince Edwards in any of his 50s film noirs—he's handsome and broody and dark and sexy and hairy and…well, you get the picture. He's got the antihero persona down pat (HIT AND RUN and MURDER BY CONTRACT to name two) and he holds the screen well—you know he's going to come to no good, but it's fun to see how far he'll fall. He's definitely the main attraction here in terms of the cast; the few other supporting players fade into the background. B-movie character actors Lyle Talbot and John Archer are fine as the main cops, and Patricia Blair is as good as she needs to be as the girlfriend. The effective score, an early work by the legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith (eventually nominated for 18 Oscars for score or song) is alternately jazzy and tense. The film's low budget works against any large-scale sense of danger for the city, despite the cops calling for a city-wide evacuation plan, but overall this is a solid B-noir. [TCM]